AREAI Wins 2023 Unleash Plus Mastercard Prize For Girl Child Education
Asocial impact organisation, Aid for Rural Education Access Initiative ( AREAI) has emerged as one of the winners at the 2023 Unleash Rwanda Dragons’ Den Pitch with its Fasttrack solution.
The AREAI team, which aims at creating and executing efficient after school programmes for the girl child, participated in the six- month incubation programme alongside 1000 young change- makers from 136 nationalities in Kigali, Rwanda, to pitch its Fasttrack solution and emerged as one of the winners, receiving the Mastercard Foundation Prize of $ 5000.
The team led by its Executive Director, Prince Gideon Olanrewaju, focused on skill development and employability for school- age children and young girls who are not enrolled in formal education, training or employment.
According to Olarenwaju, the pitch received special attention due to the innovativeness of their solution that leverages the combined strength of three different learning approaches to support female beneficiaries in acquiring literacy and numeracy skills.
“With this fund, we will be investing in the professional development of our community- based facilitators and enlist additional 200 beneficiaries to our programme’s coverage,” he said.
Fasttrack is a technology- enabled, selfassisted programme for the accelerated development of foundational skills that is intended to help out- of- school refugee children, particularly girls, acquire the fundamental literacy and numeracy skills that are essential, indispensable and needed for additional education in order to live an independent and powerful life.