The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) is teaming up with Nokia and the Pearson Foundation to launch the Education for All Crowdsourcing Challenge. This is a challenge designed to produce ideas for using mobile communication technology to assist Education for All (EFA) in achieving its goals. The challenge will last for eight months and each month will focus on one specific EFA goal.
The EFA is a global initiative committed to providing a quality education to all children and adults. The EFA was launched in 1990 by collaboration between UNESCO, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), the United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) and the World Bank. As the EFA, this group identified six key learning goals that aim to meet the educational needs of all children, youth and adults by the year 2015. These six goals are:
1. Expanding and improving comprehensive early childhood care and education, especially for the most vulnerable and disadvantaged children
2. Ensuring that by 2015 all children, particularly girls, children in difficult circumstances and those belonging to ethnic minorities, have access to, and complete, free and compulsory primary education of good quality.
3. Ensuring that the learning needs of all young people and adults are met through equitable access to appropriate learning and life-skills programmes
4. Achieving a 50 per cent improvement in levels of adult literacy by 2015, especially for women, and equitable access to basic and continuing education for all adults.
5. Eliminating gender disparities in primary and secondary education by 2005, and achieving gender equality in education by 2015, with a focus on ensuring girls’ full and equal access to and achievement in basic education of good quality.
6 . Improving all aspects of the quality of education and ensuring excellence of all so that recognized and measurable learning outcomes are achieved by all, especially in literacy, numeracy and essential life skills.
The EFA’s Crowdsourcing Challenge hopes to capitalize on the collaborative nature of “crowdsourcing” to uncover creative solutions to the task incorporating mobile communication technology into realizing the EFA’s educational goals. Crowdsourcing is a relatively new term that refers to the collaboration of a group of individuals or communities brought together to work on a common effort through an open call for input. The term, crowdsourcing, often refers to the mass teamwork that occurs through social media or other Web 2.0 platforms.
A panel of judges will determine which ideas are the best and monthly Nokia smartphone prizes will be awarded to the winners. The Pearson Foundation will also be awarding $3,000 to each sub-challenge winner as well as donating a library of children’s books to a non-profit agency in the country of each sub-challenge winner. Winning ideas will be posted on UNESCO’s website and the idea author will have the opportunity to expand on his or her idea to encourage the development of the idea into a concrete project. The challenge will run from October 10, 2011 to May 31, 2012. If you would like more information or if you are interested in submitting an idea, visit http://www.ideasproject.com/community/en/efa .