Rising Academy Waterloo revealed as a Top 3 finalist for World’s Best School Prizes 2024
Rising Academy Waterloo has been named a Top 3 finalist for the World’s Best School Prizes 2024. The five World’s Best School Prizes, founded by T4 Education in collaboration with Accenture, American Express and the Lemann Foundation, are the world’s most prestigious education awards. They recognise the pivotal role that schools play in our world and celebrate schools for their enormous contributions to their community.
The five World’s Best School Prizes - for Community Collaboration, Environmental Action, Innovation, Overcoming Adversity, and Supporting Healthy Lives – were established in 2022 to showcase best practices in education and shine a light on schools whose principals, teachers, and communities have built an aspirational school culture, through dedicated leadership and powerful innovations.
Rising Academy Waterloo, an independent pre-school through secondary school on the outskirts of Freetown Sierra Leone, which was founded in the wake of the Ebola crisis, has been named a Top 3 finalist for the World’s Best School Prize for Overcoming Adversity.
Rising Academy Waterloo is the first school in the country to have been shortlisted for an award and the only school in Africa to make it to this stage of the 2024 competition.
Sierra Leone’s Chief Minister, David Moinina Sengeh commented: “We are so proud of you, His Excellency, the entire government and the people of this country and I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate the entire school administration, starting with the Head of School, Alpha Kamara, the teachers, the students, the parents and everybody involved with the school within the community, because it’s only you that have made it happen for your school, your community and your country. As the only school in Africa that has made it this far, we congratulate you and we thank you. As a government human capital has been our priority and we have been working with different schools across the country to test digital innovations, you are one of such partners. You have worked with us, you have engaged in training with us and you have deployed solutions that we have tested, seeded and are scaling and we thank you and continue to want to work with you in everything you are doing. We do hope that you will emerge as the best school in the rest of the world. Congratulations and good luck in this final phase. Bring it home.”
Vikas Pota, Founder of T4 Education and the World’s Best School Prizes, said: “Unless the world takes urgent action, it is set to miss UN Sustainable Development Goal 4 of universal quality education by 2030. The global education crisis is multifaceted and so must be the solutions. That's why we must look to the grassroots, to our schools at the coalface, for answers. To exceptional Sierra Leone institutions like Rising Academy Waterloo, whose work should make governments around the world sit up and take notice. By spreading its innovations far and wide, we can inspire change where it's needed most.”
The Overcoming Adversity category in which Rising has been shortlisted recognises schools that have overcome significant challenges and adversity. Since it opened nearly 10 years ago, Rising Academy Waterloo has supported students and the local community through a sequence of major challenges, from recovering from the Ebola Crisis, to rapid urbanisation and persistent economic headwinds, to responding to COVID-19 and its aftermath. Thanks to School Leader Alpha Kamara’s tireless leadership, and the boundless commitment of Alpha and his teaching team to this community, Rising Waterloo has managed to navigate these challenges while doubling enrolment and achieving outstanding academic results in public exams.
While this is a particularly special moment for Alpha and his team at Waterloo, the achievement belongs to the whole Rising team, past and present, across Sierra Leone, Liberia, Ghana and Rwanda. The Rising model which has been recognised today at Waterloo couldn’t have been built without all their hard work over the last 10 years.
We were honoured to receive a message of congratulations from Sierra Leone’s Chief Minister, David Moinina Sengeh today and as we celebrate our 10th year, we’re excited to continue working with the government as well as other education reformers in Sierra Leone and across the continent to ensure that the approach and the innovations we have seen work at Waterloo can be scaled wherever they are needed, helping to raise the quality of teaching, learning and schooling for millions of children over the next 10 years.
Next Steps:
The winner of each of the five World’s Best School Prizes will be announced in October. The winner of each Prize will be chosen based on rigorous criteria by a Judging Academy comprising distinguished leaders across the globe including academics, educators, NGOs, social entrepreneurs, government, civil society, and the private sector.
A prize of US$50,000 will be equally shared among the winners of the five Prizes, with each receiving an award of US$10,000. Meanwhile, the winner of the Community Choice Award, as determined by a Public Vote, will receive membership to Best School to Work – a unique programme to help them support teacher wellbeing and solve the teacher recruitment and retention crisis.
