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Choosing the winner
The Prize Committee and the Academy will look for evidence that applicants for the Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize have employed effective instructional practices that are replicable and scalable to influence the quality of education globally.
The committee will also be tasked to find out if the teachers have employed innovative instructional practices that address the particular challenges of the school, community or country and which have shown sufficient evidence to suggest they could be effective in addressing such challenges in a new way.
They must also have helped the learners become global citizens through providing them with a value-based education theme for a world where they will potentially live, work and socialize with people from many different nationalities, culture and religions.
“Congratulations to Rosemary Nyirumbe for reaching the final 50. I hope her story inspires those looking to enter the teaching profession and highlights the incredible work teachers do all over the world every day,” said Sunny Varkey, founder of the Varkey Foundation and the Global Teacher Prize in a statement to The Independent.
“We’re also proud to partner with UNESCO as we all must now work together to do whatever it takes to give every child their birthright: a great education. Our generation will not be forgiven if we continue to deny the lifeblood of education to those in the next.”
Varkey said that the Global Teacher Prize will start this new decade with renewed purpose and energy, moving the prize ceremony around the world, spreading the message deeper into new host countries, and making the prize’s reputation live up to its name as a true global celebration of teachers.
“Our recent Global Teacher Status Index finally gives academic proof to something that we’ve always instinctively known: the link between the status of teachers in society and the performance of children in school. Now we can say beyond doubt that respecting teachers isn’t only an important moral duty – it’s essential for a country’s educational
outcomes.”
Nyirumbe began teaching at St Monica’s Girls Training Centre in the northern Ugandan town of Gulu in 2002. Many of her students were traumatized survivors who had been kidnapped to serve in Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
She has since enrolled more than 2,000 young girls and women in her vocational school to learn business skills, secretarial studies, sewing and catering, skills which help them become economically self-reliant. Other resourceful projects she has created to benefit both school and students include a restaurant on campus to teach catering skills that also generates income for the school.
Nyirumbe founded The Sewing Hope Foundation as a nonprofit to rehabilitate child soldiers from the civil war, transforming them into peacemakers through education. She also created a kindergarten for her students’ children that began as a space under a tree and now occupies a new building able to accommodate 250 people.
Her other innovations include; building houses and infrastructure out of leftover plastic bottles and manufacturing pop tab purses with her students – now sold worldwide to help support the other programmes.
She has also contributed to panels at the World Economic Forum, established partnerships with Notre Dame and Oklahoma State universities, and won the 2007 CNN Heroes award.
Six years ago, in 2014, Nyirumbe was listed as one of Time magazine’s 100 Most Influential People for her empowerment of women and children in Uganda. She has travelled the world to explain her approach and has been awarded four honorary doctorates, while pursuing her own doctoral qualification in Structural Education and Leadership.
The Global Teacher Prize winner will be paid the prize money in equal installments over ten years, and the Varkey Foundation will provide the winner with financial counseling.
“Without compromising their work in the classroom, the winner will be asked to serve as a global ambassador for the Varkey Foundation, attending public forms about improving the prestige of the teaching profession,” Varkey Foundation said.
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