queen of connection | Shelby L. Phillips

Eradicate Illiteracy, Really? Yep! Pass It On

September 24, 2014 at 7:23 pm Leave a comment

For those of you who are passionate about kids and education, I wanted to share something I believe is an amazing mission and goal that XPRIZE launched this week.

XPRIZE strives to make the impossible possible and have tackled some of the world’s grandest challenges. This includes private spaceflight, 100 MPGe cars, oil-cleanup technology and most recently, competitions to go back to the Moon, address ocean acidification, and revolutionize healthcare.

This week a “Global Learning XPRIZE” was launched. This is a $15 million competition to create Open Source software that will teach a child to read, write, and perform basic numeracy within 18 months without the aid of a teacher. (This is not designed to replace teachers, but to provide an educational solution where little or none exists.)

According to UNESCO figures, 250 million kids in the world today lack basic literacy skills. As you can imagine, this XPRIZE could have a profound impact on these kids and bringing nations out of poverty.

An important part of this XPRIZE is a crowdfunding campaign that they are running to raise an additional $500,000 that will go towards furthering the impact and success of the prize. This money will go towards additional testing of the finalist’s technologies with more kids in more villages and towns, building infrastructure to help teams collaborative effectively, growing a global community of developers, designers, advocates and more, and investing in an open technology platform for society that will live on long past the conclusion of this XPRIZE.

I believe this is a tremendously valuable XPRIZE, and I would like to personally encourage you to go and contribute what you can at http://igg.me/at/learningxprize/x – there are a range of perks that might capture your interest too.

You can also get involved in this worthy project yourself; spreading the word, creating a team, sharing your knowledge, simply by going to http://learning.xprize.org/get-involved.

We can do this, and together we can achieve even more!

Entry filed under: Connection, Education, Parenting, Politics, Relationships. Tags: Crowdfunding, Education, Illiteracy, Poverty, UNESCO, XPrize.