World Economic Forum Names OLE India Partners ‘Social Entrepreneurs of the Year’
Blogging from the Global OLE Assembly in Kathmandu, Nepal – Padmanabha and Rama Rao, , co-founders of the Rishi Valley Institute for Educational Research (RIVER) in Andhra Pradesh, will be awarded the World Economic Forum’s (WEF’s) “social entrepreneur of the year” honor for India this weekend in New Delhi, the Raos revealed at the OLE Global Assembly.
Padmanabha and Rama Rao
As described in the Hindustan Times, the Schwab Foundation (formed by WEF Founder Klaus Schwab) and the United Nations Development Programme have conferred the honor, as a result of which the Raos will be presenting their educational innovations at the WEF’s Davos Forum of world leaders this January in Switzerland.
The Rao’s innovative student-centered educational content for multigrade schools (and multiple levels of learning within grades) was initially developed in the Rishi Valley of India and has now been expanded to 75,000 Indian schools, serving 7.9 million children. It has also been introduced in Ethiopia and Germany. In October, Nepali school officials visited the Rishi Valley and they are now beginning to implement the model in Nepal.
A cornerstone of the Open Learning Exchange’s strategy is to identify and work with strong social entrepreneurs in the countries where it establishes OLE Centers. OLE also emphasizes the importance of quality in education, and in a profile on the Ashoka’s Changemakers.net, the Raos are described among “the foremost practitioners of community based quality school initiatives.”
About the Global OLE Assembly
The Open Learning Exchange (OLE), an emerging global network dedicated to educating the world’s children, is holding its first meeting of educational innovators from across the developing world in Kathmandu on November 2 to 7, hosted by OLE Nepal.
Among those attending have been Mahashram Sharma (Director General of Department of Education); Lawa Dev Awasthi (Joint Secretary of Nepal’s Ministry of Education); Haribol Khanal (Executive Director of Nepal’s Curriculum Development Center); Prativa Pandey (Chairperson of the Board of Directors of OLE Nepal and Chair of the opening session); Richard Rowe (Founder and CEO of OLE International) and members of his team; Kedar Bhakta Mathema (Former Vice Chancellor of Tribhuvan University and the Chief of the advisory board of OLE Nepal); Rabi Karmacharya (Executive Director of OLE Nepal) and members of his team; and representatives from OLE Centers and partners in Bolivia, the Dominican Republic, Rwanda, and other countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, Latin America, and North America.
