The ARED affiliation, based in Senegal, has been awarded the celebrated Yidan Prize for its progressive strategies of studying in a number of languages.
Mamadou Amadou Ly, head of the organisation Associates in Analysis and Schooling for Improvement (ARED), has change into the primary African to obtain the 2025 Yidan Prize for Schooling Improvement, some of the prestigious worldwide awards on this sector.
In keeping with the Yidan Prize Basis, the Senegalese nationwide is being honoured ‘for his contribution to eradicating obstacles to fundamental schooling in West and Central Africa’.
Underneath his management, ARED has developed bilingual schooling fashions utilizing nationwide languages, which ‘considerably enhance the fundamental studying, writing and numeracy abilities of each school-going and out-of-school kids’.
Mamadou Amadou Ly, in response to the Basis, has demonstrated the transformative energy of instructing in languages that kids know alongside the languages they should study and has introduced a versatile path for bilingual schooling in West and Central Africa.
ARED’s instructing and studying supplies are freely licensed and accessible to all on the Early Studying Useful resource Community. Its community-based and culturally applicable method has influenced nationwide schooling coverage in Senegal, Mauritania, The Gambia and elsewhere.
The Yidan Prize awards a prize of roughly $3.8 million, which have to be used to fund particular initiatives. This leads Mamadou Amadou Ly to say that this award ‘will allow ARED to considerably speed up its work, proving that bilingual, community-based, evidence-based and accessible schooling can bridge studying gaps and encourage public coverage.’
Dorothy Gordon, chair of the jury, highlights the worldwide significance of his achievements in selling fairness and inclusion in schooling. ‘Mamadou Ly’s visionary work in multilingual schooling gives strategies that pave the way in which for literacy and provide alternatives to college students all over the world, whereas preserving linguistic and cultural identities. This path in the direction of inclusive and equitable studying environments evokes schooling reform in Africa and past.’
Modern options
For her half, Awa Ka Dia, programme director at ARED, reiterates the organisation’s method: ‘Collaboration is on the coronary heart of our success, as a result of remodeling schooling can’t be accomplished alone.’ As a key technical accomplice of the Senegalese Ministry of Schooling, ARED conducts utilized analysis and gives knowledge to tell and strengthen nationwide college curricula. Demonstrating their adaptability and potential for large-scale deployment, ARED’s free and open sources are additionally utilized in Mauritania and The Gambia.
It ought to be famous that the Senegalese professor is being honoured alongside Professor Uri Wilensky, winner of the 2025 Yidan Prize within the Schooling Analysis class. This professor of studying sciences, laptop science and sophisticated methods at Northwestern College is being recognised for his progressive work within the area of agent-based modelling, which promotes understanding of advanced methods and bridges disciplinary information. He has additionally developed a free, open-source instrument, NetLogo, to facilitate a greater understanding of advanced phenomena, from local weather change to pandemics and financial instability. This instrument can be utilized by each younger kids and researchers.
The Yidan Prize subsequently rewards change makers within the area of instructional analysis and growth whose work is forward-looking, progressive, transformative and sustainable. Professor Uri Wilensky and Mamadou Amadou Ly will be a part of the Yidan Prize Laureates Council, a group of good minds from analysis and observe who search to collaborate, share alternatives and discover methods to create a greater world via schooling. The laureates might be honoured on the Yidan Prize Award Ceremony to be held on 6 December in Hong Kong.
ARED is a non-profit organisation primarily based in Dakar. Based in 1990, it develops progressive bilingual schooling programmes and trainer coaching, and publishes instructing supplies in nationwide languages. Its work has strengthened literacy and promoted mom tongue schooling, influencing instructional reforms in Senegal and all through the area. ARED’s imaginative and prescient is for each learner to have entry to high quality schooling in their very own language, whereas preserving their cultural identification and selling group growth.
Ndaw Wune
The gradual and iterative design course of builds progressive options in collaboration with group members, nationwide specialists, educators, and linguists. This work, which started in 2008 as a pilot mission with the Senegalese authorities, has now been adopted as a part of the nationwide schooling coverage. The fashions use a structured pedagogical method, together with complete trainer coaching and high-quality, culturally applicable studying supplies, which permits college students to start studying in a language they know after which transition to studying in that language and in French. Energetic participatory studying, levelled studying teams and versatile classroom preparations are basic to changing conventional, now outdated, lecture-style instructing. On this approach, the programme stimulates social-emotional studying and enhances creativity.
The outstanding impression of the programme is illustrated by the Ndaw Wune (Success for All) accelerated studying programme, an educational and extracurricular remedial programme for struggling second and third yr college students liable to dropping out of college. The outcomes are clear: in a single yr, Ndaw Wune college students improved their studying abilities by 74% in letter recognition, 100% in syllable studying and 134% in phrase studying. This reveals, in response to its promoters and the Basis’s jury, that schooling methods may be extra equitable and inclusive.
