Mumbai,  The Mumbai-based Pratham Education Foundation's CEO Dr Rukmini Banerji and Stanford University's Prof Eric A. Hanushek have been awarded the '2021 Yidan Prize for Education Research', carrying an award of $3.90 million, or almost Rs 28-crore, for each laureate, making it the world's highest education accolade.

The coveted award from the Yidan Prize Foundation, Hong Kong, has recognised their ground-breaking work addressing a crucial piece of the education puzzle pertaining to 'improving quality of education and outcomes for learners at scale'.

"Dr Banerji and the Pratham team have a clear mission: 'Every child in school and learning well', a reminder that we need to focus on quality of education and not just school enrolments. The solutions that they have deployed towards this goal have proven to be cost-effective and scalable with a demonstrated potential to impact globally-disruptive education innovation with transformative results", said Dorothy K. Gordon, of the jury and Board Member of the UNESCO Institute for Information Technologies in Education.

"Like no one else, Eric has been able to link the fields of economics and education. From designing better and fairer systems for evaluating teachers' performance to linking better learning outcomes to long-run economic and social progress, he has made an amazing range of education policy areas amenable to rigorous economic analysis," said Andreas Schleicher, of the judging panel.