Mumbai-based Pratham Education Foundation's (PEF) CEO Dr. Rukmini Banerji and Stanford University’s Prof. Eric A. Hanushek have won  the prestigious ‘2021 Yidan Prize for Education Research’, the world’s highest education accolade that carries a cash prize of $ 3.90 million, or almost `28-crore, for each laureate.

Dr Banerji and Prof Hanushek have been bestowed with the prestigious award in recognition of their ground-breaking work addressing a crucial piece of the education puzzle: improving quality of education and outcomes for learners at scale.

With this announcement, the two academicians will now join nine laureates who have been awarded the Yidan Prize since its inception in 2016, established by the Yidan Prize Foundation --- a global philanthropic education foundation that inspires progress and change in education. All Yidan Prize laureates will join the Yidan Council of Luminaries to work collaboratively with distinguished education leaders.

Dr Banerji has been chosen for the award in recognition of her work in improving learning outcomes. The Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) assessment approach, pioneered by Dr Banerji and her team in India, revealed literacy and numeracy gaps among children who had already spent several years at school.

To close these gaps, her team’s “Teaching at the Right Level” (TaRL) program works with schools and local communities to provide basic reading and arithmetic skills, ensuring no children are left behind. This systematic, replicable model reaches millions of children annually across the country and is spreading around the globe.

“Dr Rukmini Banerji and the Pratham team have a clear mission: ‘Every child in school and learning well’. It is a reminder that we need to focus on education quality and not just school enrolments. The solutions that they have deployed towards this goal have proven to be cost-effective and scalable with a demonstrated potential to impact globally—disruptive education innovation with transformative results”, said Dorothy K. Gordon, head of Yidan Prize for Education Development judging panel, and Board Member of the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education.

With the support of the Yidan Prize, Dr Banerji plans to strengthen and expand Pratham’s work with young children so that strong foundations could be built early in a child’s life. She said she believed this would contribute significantly towards the goal of seeing “every child in school and learning well”.

Prof Hanushek, Paul and Jean Hanna Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution of Stanford University, has been recognised for his work that focuses on education outcomes and the importance of teaching quality and has transformed both research and policy internationally.

His work helped shape the United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 4 (ensure inclusive and equitable quality education) by reframing targets for learning outcomes and has shown that it’s how much students learn – and not how many years they spend in school – that boosts economies.

“Like no one else, Eric has been able to link the fields of economics and education. From designing better and fairer systems for evaluating teacher performance to linking better learning outcomes to long-run economic and social progress, he has made an amazing range of education policy areas amenable to rigorous economic analysis.” Mr Andreas Schleicher, head of the Yidan Prize for Education Research judging panel, said.

With the Yidan Prize funding, Professor Hanushek is planning a research fellow program in Africa, supporting analytical capacity to shape education policies from a local perspective.

“The quality and diversity of this year’s nominations reflect the drive and passion around the world to unlock new approaches to education. Our nominees are working on projects that span over 130 countries and territories. They are rethinking education systems from top to bottom, tackling inequities and empowering learners,” Dr Koichiro Matsuura, Chairman of the Yidan Prize Judging Committee and the former Director-General of UNESCO said.

The Yidan Prize community is making an impact on global education challenges. Each laureate will be awarded HK$30 million (approximately US$3.9 million), half of which is a project fund – enabling a series of innovative and progressive education projects to scale up and support millions of learners globally.Meanwhile, the Hong Kong-based institution has announced Oct. 19, 2021 till March 2022 as the period of nominations for Yidan Prize-2022.