Prestigious award for Shilpa Sayura

By Jayampathy Jayasinghe

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Sri Lankan Shilpa Sayura won the prestigious Stockholm’s Challenge Award 2008 of the Royal Institute of Technology, sponsored by the City Council of Stockholm recently.

The award was presented to the Project Director of the Sri Lanka E-Fusion Education Program, Niranjan Meegammana, at a ceremony held in the Blue Hall venue of the Nobel Banquet, Stockholm, Sweden last week. Mrs Yamuna Ratnayake, a government teacher who represented the Shilpa Sayura also participated at the award ceremony in Stockholm. A cash prize of 5000 Euros was awarded for Shilpa Sayura program.

Meegammana said that it was a stiff competition as they had to compete with 420 countries. “We won the award under the education category,” he said. Shilpa Sayura had earlier won the I4D award at India in 2007 and the Stockholm Challenge GKP Award GK3 in Malaysia in the same year.

Meegammmana said that the Shilpa Sayura program provides digital self learning programs based on national curriculum of Sri Lanka for students in the remote and rural areas who do not have adequate resources and teachers for their education.

“Our aim is to improve self learning capacity of handicapped students in remote areas and to prepare them for national examinations. The subjects are taught in the Sinhala and the Tamil mediums at Nanasala centres in Hambantota and Moneragala’, “he said.

Shilpa Sayura is a community project initiated by the e-Sri Lanka ICTA e-society with State funding.