Nanda Wanninayaka
Nanda Wanninayaka hails from a rural village 50 miles away from Anuradhapura. He realised the competitive disadvantage of rural students was the lack of English skills and the low levels of infrastructure which discouraged business investment.
He filled this void by creating a parallel system through the
Horizon Lanka Foundation www. horizonlanka.org which he founded in his own rural village, Mahawilachchiya, 20 years ago.
His model relies on innovative teaching methods that combine English with computerskills training, and the simultaneous development of community-wide Internet connectivity. Extensively deploying local and foreign volunteers’ contribution is the key to the success of his low-cost educational model that could be replicated anywhere, even under a tree, exactly like how ‘Horizon Lanka’ was born in 1998.
He transformed his village into an “e-village,” equipping it with household computers and free, unlimited Internet access even as early as 2004. Using a combination of soft loans, subsidies and gifts, he has provided over 400 computers and 100 tabs, laptops, etc. over the last 20 years to families and public schools in the area. These were connected to the Internet via an affordable “mesh” Wi-fi internet network technology in 2006, 10 years before the government provided limited free Wi-fi to urban hotspots in Sri Lanka.
He further went to the extent of convincing a leading blue-chip company to start a Business Process Operation (BPO) in the village and now the successful model is being replicated in other villages too.
He was a visionary leader to create such a powerful model that has attracted the attention
of not only local communities & the national government, but also the national and international business community, and multilateral institutions.
Currently the Horizon Lanka Foundation has branched out to 5 rural villages in 3 districts in 3 provinces in Sri Lanka by launching 5 Horizon Academies to Sinhalese, Tamil and Muslim communities. Nanda has introduced a franchise system that enables anybody to purchase Horizon Academy franchises and run them with the same quality standards of the initial 7 Horizon Academies that are already running. The royalty fee coming from the new franchises will sustain the existing academies.
His tagline for the Horizon Academy is – “The Edutainment Academy of Sri Lanka.” All disciplines are imparted to the students using a lot of entertainment during mostly outdoor classroom activities. Due to his tireless efforts his students have qualified as Doctors, Engineers, IT specialists, Teachers and become successful people in society.
This recipients innovative out-of-the-box thinking enlightened the Mahawilachchiya village and he has replicated this model around Mahawilachchiya at Thantirimale, Ralapanawa, Ukkulankulama and Dutuwewa. This model was extended to Jaffna - Maniyanthotam, Nuwara Eliya - Kirimatiya Estate, Kandy - Udadeltota and Ampara - Panama.
We as lions seriously believe is supporting the less fortunate in society and this award recipient has done the same over two decades and still continue to do so and we have no hesitation in recognising him with the Most Outstanding Citizen Award under this year’s theme EXCEPTIONAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO SOCIETY’