News
sQuid at the World Humanitarian Summit
23 May 2016
Today, sQuid CEO, Adam Smith, attended the opening seminar at the World Humanitarian Summit in Istanbul. The Stepping Up in Crises: Finance Delivery and Innovation in Education event was held in a private forum by UN Secretary-General, Ban Ki-moon, and organised by the Global Business Coalition for Education.
The UN Secretary-General called on the international community including the private sector to invest wisely in education, reminding us that education is a right and not a privilege. In our own efforts, sQuid alongside its other partners is helping to improve access to education through the iMlango programme in Kenya, where we work to improve the educational outcomes of marginalised primary school children.
With iMlango, we are seeing first-hand how ICT can work effectively to leverage education resources and make exciting learning tools available to teachers and students, even in marginalised communities. iMlango operates in 205 primary schools and helps 150,000 children to achieve better learning outcomes. The programme works closely with the Kenyan Ministry of Education and is a strategic partnership between a consortium of private companies bringing the technologies and applications, and the UK’s Department for International Development as part of DFID's Girls' Education Challenge.
Aligning with the objectives of the WHS, sQuid has made a commitment to extend the reach of the key iMlango services that are making such a big impact in Kenya - including its attendance monitoring system for students and its flexible online digital learning platform, which delivers context relevant educational content and tracks the progress of students.
Adam Smith said: "Our platform opens up partnership opportunities with content providers for any humanitarian theatre, and the data rich nature of the programme provides valuable real-time insights into education. sQuid will continue to make the case for the intelligent use of ICT in education in crisis contexts. We have noted the call at the World Humanitarian Summit for education spending in humanitarian contexts to increase from 2% to 4%, and even towards 10%, and we hope that funders will respond to this to enable good results-driven programmes that thrive and make a real impact where they are needed.”
For more information on sQuid, or our solutions for the Humanitarian sector, please contact us by clicking on the message icon below.
For more information on the iMlango programme, please visit iMlango.com
Photo credit: Ender Seyyar/GBC-Education - gbc-education.org