Winners of first ‘ICT 4 Inclusion Challenge’ in Africa announced
Winners from Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa present their impressive methods for inclusive instruction
Paris, France – December 3, 2021
The ICT 4 Inclusion Obstacle (ICT4IC) aims to form inclusive education for people with disabilities in Africa. The 3 winning teams were presented with their awards these days in the course of the ceremony which took position just about, livestreamed from Atos’ headquarters in Bezons and its places of work in Munich. The competitors saw 202 applications with more than 400 participants from 37 international locations all-around the world compete.
The opposition was structured by Atos and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) GmbH on behalf for German Federal Ministry for Financial Cooperation and Development (BMZ) together with the Make-IT Alliance. Digital inclusion stands at the heart of Atos’ raison d’etre and materializes into Atos’ knowledge portfolio, with particular solutions helping men and women with short term or everlasting disabilities to work with no boundaries in the electronic place of work.
The purpose of the problem is to develop electronic improvements which are made to increase obtain to education and learning for those people with disabilities in Africa. The groups have been questioned to submit a digital or technical innovation (strategy, mock-up or evidence-of-concept (PoC)) that supplies or increases accessibility to education and learning for youngsters, youths and/or older people with disabilities in Africa. This could be a digital machine or application electronic assistive technologies an concept to raise consciousness for inclusive schooling applying digital systems and accessibility options for online finding out environments.
Following an initial first spherical in which 10 groups ended up picked by 24 judges to show up at a 2-week digital bootcamp, the 9 specialists strong final jury panel, made up of Atos executives as well as gurus from GIZ, the personal sector, civil culture and international companies, chose 3 finalists. These are:
- 1st prize and level of competition winner: ‘Vinsighte’, Nigeria
Vinsighte is a reading through software package / application that will make use of Artificial Intelligence to help the visually impaired to read through conveniently. It will work by scanning by way of texts on textbooks and reading through the publications aloud to the visually impaired consumer. The team gained €6,500.
2nd prize: ‘Virtual E&T’, South Africa
This personalized app provides accessible and inexpensive Digital Education and learning and Training Portal for people today with mental disabilities. The staff won €2,500.
3rd prize: ‘Talking Charts’, Kenya
This option addresses the accessibility challenges of knowledge visualization for the folks with visual impairment and blind individuals by artificial speech and car-captioning. The group received €1,000.
Each individual participant in each of three successful groups was awarded a devoted 3-month mentorship program at Atos starting up in January 2022, as properly as monetary prizes and an chance to pitch to be section of Atos Scaler, the Group’s accelerator program.
Commenting on these effects, Udo Littke, Head of Atos in Central Europe mentioned “Congratulations to our winners and to all of our contestants! I’m blown-away by the creative imagination and quality of the entries.Obtain to schooling is a single of the finest limitations to inclusion for young children, youthful people and adults with disabilities in Africa and electronic innovations can aid to triumph over this obstacle by taking away barriers to education for persons with disabilities. We’re incredibly proud to inspire the new technology to enable shape the inclusive education and learning in Africa”.
The judging panel was cautiously picked to offer abilities in the fields of schooling, Facts and Interaction Technologies (ICT), innovation, accessibility, and disability inclusion as properly as regional African perspectives. The competitiveness entrants necessary to be long lasting residents of an African nation or non-residents teaming up with an African organization, proving that their answer is not yet readily available on the sector and encouraging that people of disabilities are both aspect of the staff or incorporated into the solution progress approach.
To come across out a lot more, be sure to go to https://ict4inclusionchallenge.net/ .
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Photo 1: Oluwatomisin Kolawole from “Vinsights” Image 2: Santie Terreblanche , Thomas Bezuidenhout, Taryn Du Toit, Mpilo Khumalo from “Digital E&T” and Picture 3: Eric Maina Wamugu from “Conversing Charts”
About Atos
Atos is a world chief in electronic transformation with 107,000 workforce and yearly revenue of over € 11 billion. European selection a single in cybersecurity, cloud and large-performance computing, the Team presents personalized close-to-stop methods for all industries in 71 nations around the world. A pioneer in decarbonization services and goods, Atos is committed to a secure and decarbonized electronic for its clientele. Atos is a SE (Societas Europaea), shown on Euronext Paris and incorporated in the CAC 40 ESG and Future 20 indexes.
The reason of Atos is to enable design and style the foreseeable future of the information area. Its experience and services help the development of know-how, education and study in a multicultural approach and contribute to the progress of scientific and technological excellence. Across the globe, the Group enables its consumers and staff, and members of societies at massive to stay, do the job and develop sustainably, in a risk-free and secure data room.
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