Learning + Society
Learning + Society
Designed to close the global education gap for children with limited access to schools or teachers, this prize challenged teams to create scalable, open-source software that could teach literacy and numeracy in just 15 months, empowering kids to learn on their own, anywhere.
Impact
2,500 tablets delivered to children in 141 villages in rural Tanzania during field testing
14M youth reached by STEM software learning
55+ countries used prize-winning software during COVID-19 school closures
Winner
onebillion
Created low-cost, distraction-free tablets using games and stories to teach literacy and math. Active in 17 countries, reaching 750K children and scaling to 3.5M in Malawi by 2029.
Enuma (Kitkit School)
Enuma’s Kitkit software, with 20K+ activities, achieved the highest learning gains in the prize. Their STEM education software has reached over 14 million youth across 74 countries.
onebillion
Enuma, Inc
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Sponsors
Sponsors fund the prize journey from bold idea to breakthrough—shaping each competition, supporting global teams, and accelerating solutions that scale. Their backing powers impact that lasts well beyond the prize.
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Partners
Partners play a hands-on role in our prizes—co-designing competitions, supporting operations, and helping scale solutions with their expertise, resources, and global reach.
Barrier
Over 250 million children worldwide lack access to quality education. Meeting this need would require 1.6 million teachers by 2030, an impossible task without technology that delivers learning directly to children at scale.
Breakthrough
Open-source, tablet-based solutions enable children to teach themselves to read, write, and do math in just 15 months. Designed for global scale, these tools can reach millions, even in the most remote regions.
About the Prize
The $15M Global Learning XPRIZE set out to solve one of humanity’s most urgent challenges: providing quality education to every child, regardless of geography or resources. Competing teams were tasked with creating open-source, scalable software that could teach basic literacy and numeracy within 15 months—without schools or teachers.
At the time, autonomous learning devices were nearly nonexistent, and few had credible evidence of impact. This prize changed that. Through a first-of-its-kind randomized controlled trial in rural Tanzania, 2,500 tablets were distributed to children across 141 villages, engaging a 700+ person ecosystem with partners including UNESCO, the World Food Programme, and the Tanzanian government. The results demonstrated that autonomous learning solutions could deliver significant learning gains, accelerating foundational skill development at scale.
Two co-winners emerged: onebillion, whose tablets teach through games and stories, and Enuma, whose Kitkit School software achieved the highest learning gains. Since the prize, onebillion has scaled to 17 countries and aims to reach every primary school child in Malawi by 2029, while Kitkit School has reached 14m+ learners and provided free education to students in 55+ countries during COVID-19.
By making both winning platforms open-source, the prize empowered governments, NGOs, and developers worldwide to adapt and scale the solutions—unlocking a path toward universal access to quality education.
Prize Schedule
Launched in 2014, the competition’s 15-month field test concluded in 2018 in Tanzania. Onebillion and Enuma’s Kitkit School were named co-winners, and their open-source software was released globally for large-scale adoption.
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