What is the name of your organization?
Stichting War Child Alliance
What is the name of your solution?
Can’t Wait to Learn (CWTL)
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
Closing the education gap for millions of children in low-resource and conflict-affected communities with low-connectivity AI-powered Learning.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
Amsterdam, Netherlands
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
Netherlands
What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
What specific problem are you solving?
The world continues to grapple with a significant learning crisis, exacerbated by COVID-19, forced displacement, and the climate crisis, particularly in conflict-affected and low-resource contexts. It is a crisis of both access and quality:
• An estimated 234 million children urgently need educational access, with more than 85 million children out of school due to conflict and crisis, and one third facing the repercussions of climate-related events which have been intensified by climate change (ECW, 2024).
• A further 59 million are in school but failing to attain minimum proficiency in reading at the end of primary education. Just 17% of crisis-affected children attending primary school achieve a minimum reading proficiency by the end of primary school (ECW, 2024).
These children fall years behind their peers. Those who can attend school face overcrowded classrooms, undertrained teachers, interrupted learning, and trauma that inhibits their ability to focus and learn. Their education is disrupted by violence, displacement, and poverty. Learning in languages they don't speak at home, with curricula that don't reflect their reality, and in systems stretched beyond capacity, they accumulate learning gaps that compound over time. The implications for the future of these young people, their families and communities are staggering.
What is your solution?
Can't Wait to Learn (CWTL) is an award-winning, games-based digital personalised learning (DPL) platform, proven to improve foundational literacy and numeracy for school-aged children (aged 6-16) in crisis-affected and low-resource contexts. It provides stability, quality learning, and wellbeing support despite the chaos around them. Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FxNpjJyyuOc
Designed for low-connectivity settings, CWTL is co-created with Ministries of Education, local and international organisations, as well as children, artists, and education experts to deliver a contextualised, personalised learning experience. We integrate within existing systems to build sustainable capacity rather than dependency, driving government adoption, building local stakeholder capacity, and supporting teacher development through government and partner-led professional development.
Learner gameplay generates invaluable data on their progress through the curriculum. We are advancing the use of AI for DPL in low resource contexts by rolling out features to drive adaptive learning, and translating this data into actionable insights for teachers, governments and partners.
Equity is embedded throughout: offline-first architecture ensures reach in the lowest-resource settings; co-creation with children and communities ensures cultural and linguistic relevance; and accessibility features support diverse learners, including girls and marginalised groups.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
Our mission is to enable school-aged children (aged 6-16) in crisis-affected and low-resource settings across the world to build foundational literacy and numeracy skills. Conflict, climate change and natural disasters, and extreme poverty all serve as major barriers to quality education access. Children lack the safety, stability, and resources to focus on learning. School infrastructure is frequently destroyed, repurposed, or simply closed, while a global teacher crisis exacerbates these challenges. System-level challenges also include social and cultural norms that may not support all children learning, gaps in funding for education, stretched government resources, poorly contextualised curricula, and data and evidence gaps.
By combining culturally contextualised, curriculum-aligned, game design with offline-first technology, we ensure learners even in the world’s most challenging environments can master foundational literacy and numeracy. We equip governments, implementing partners, and educators with the capacity, evidence, and resources to deliver effective foundational education at scale. This in turn has been proven, through peer reviewed research across six contexts, to lead to children achieving significant and accelerated learning gains, and remaining engaged in education. Ultimately, this has the potential to result in children completing their education with the skills they need, achieving improved life outcomes despite their circumstances.
