XPRIZE Launches $500,000 Crowdfunding Campaign on Indiegogo; Announces Its Next Moonshot

XPRIZE Chairman and CEO, Dr. Peter H. Diamandis announced the launch of the $15M Global Learning XPRIZE during a presentation at the Social Good Summit. Diamandis will be joined on-stage by technology entrepreneur, Anousheh Ansari, and Senior Advisor in the Executive Office of the President of Kenya, Ruth Kagia. The Global Learning XPRIZE is a five-year competition challenging teams to develop open source and scalable software that will enable children in developing countries to teach themselves basic reading, writing and arithmetic.

XPRIZEOn Saturday (September 20th), XPRIZE debuted its crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo that is seeking to mobilize a global street team of supporters to get involved with the Global Learning XPRIZE. Every dollar pledged will go towards optimizing the success of the prize, specifically focusing on supporting team recruitment globally and expanding field testing.

The XPRIZE team stated on the campaign website, “250 million children around the world today don’t have basic literacy skills. To provide universal primary education we would need 1.6 million additional teachers by 2015. Literacy unlocks potential, opens up opportunity, and helps bring nations out of poverty.”

“We are launching the Global Learning XPRIZE in which teams around the world compete to create and demonstrate Open Source software that can teach a child basic reading, writing, and arithmetic in just 18 months without the aid of a teacher. This is not designed to replace teachers, but to bring an educational solution where little or no education exists.”

Dr. Peter H. DiamandisDiamandis stated, “With the awarding of the Ansari XPRIZE 10 years ago, we catalyzed the commercial spaceflight industry, which has now grown to become a multi-billion-dollar industry. Today, we are thrilled to launch our next world-changing competition to revolutionize global literacy. We will never build enough schools or train enough teachers to meet demand, which brings us to a pivotal moment where an alternative, radical approach is needed. This open source solution can be iterated upon, scaled and deployed around the world, bringing quality learning experiences to children no matter where they live.”

The Global Learning XPRIZE will launch with a six-month team registration period. Registered teams will then have 18 months to develop their solutions, at which point, a panel of third-party expert judges will evaluate and select the top five teams to proceed in the competition, each receiving a $1M award. Solutions will be tested in the field across a minimum of 100 villages, reaching thousands of children in the developing world, over an 18-month period.

XPRIZE 1The testing will take place in a country where English is a primary language of instruction. The $10M top prize will ultimately be awarded to the team that develops a technology solution demonstrating the greatest levels of proficiency gains in reading, writing and arithmetic.

Since its launch on the platform, the campaign has raised over $55,000. It is set to close on November 6th.

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