The World Innovation Summit for Education (WISE), an initiative of Qatar Foundation (QF), has revealed the five ‘EdTech’ initiatives selected to join its 2018-19 WISE Accelerator programme.
The five 2018-19 WISE Accelerator initiatives will kick off the programme during the WISE@NewYork forum that will take place on September 22 in New York. During the forum, representatives of these initiatives will take part in workshops, attend classes, and participate in pitching sessions.
The five 2018-19 WISE Accelerator initiatives are: ScholarX; Chatterbox; ImBlaze; SmartScience and Uptale.
ScholarX is a social impact startup based in Nigeria and enables African youth to access education through various education financing solutions, regardless of their socio-economic background. ScholarX offers a scholarship aggregator mobile/web app, which has over 10,000 local and foreign-targeted scholarships. It also provides a micro-scholarship crowdfunding platform called ‘Village’ that connects local students with tuition funding sponsors worldwide.
Based in the UK, Chatterbox is a language-tutoring platform created and delivered by refugees. Chatterbox finds, trains and then contracts highly skilled refugees to deliver language training to their clients. Chatterbox tackles the problem of unemployment among refugee populations, turning what would usually be considered a barrier to refugee employment – their native language – into an asset.
An initiative of the Big Picture Company, in the US, ImBlaze is an online management platform that enables educators and students to easily and efficiently manage out-of-school internship experiences, to support real-world, personalised learning. It supports students to look for an internship, and once the internship starts, the educator in school and the mentor in the workplace accompany the student in the learning process.
SmartScience, based in the US,  provides students with an online platform that facilitates learning in the sciences. The company developed a technology that allows students to test a hypothesis by measuring results on videos of real-world experiments. SmartScience offers over 300 lessons in the sciences, and every lesson is designed with the goal of fostering the learning of the experimentation method among students.
Uptale is a French startup that offers a software-as-a-service platform to enable creators to imagine, create, publish, and monitor immersive learning experiences using Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality technology. Uptale allows anyone – without any technical background or prior training – to create gamified interactive VR and AR learning content and publish it using the Uptale platform.
The WISE Accelerator team will also organise high-level meetings between representatives of the five initiatives and leaders and entrepreneurs from organisations that are developing solutions and programmes in education and EdTech. 
The WISE Accelerator supports the development of innovative education technology initiatives with high potential to make a positive impact. The selected initiatives receive support from mentors and WISE partners to scale up their startups, improve their international visibility, and identify potential partners, donors, and investors through networking opportunities organised by WISE.
Chibeza Agley, co-founder and CEO of CamBioScience, a member of the programme’s 2017-18 cohort, said: “The WISE Accelerator has had a profound impact on the development and scale-up of CamBioScience. The programme provided the team with hand-picked mentors whose profile and experience matched the needs of our business, and the level of expert support we have received from our selected mentors and the WISE Accelerator management team over the last year has been phenomenal.”


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