Towards Achieving Education For All: Realizing Sustainable Development Goals Through Space Systems and Artificial Intelligence

Education for All project of Nanritam, an Indian non-profit, is an ambitious yet necessary idea born out of the difficulties faced during COVID-19 pandemic. One of its main projects is the Filix School established in 2014 in a remote rural and economically backward area of Purulia, West Bengal, India with the aim of providing holistic, equitable and quality education to the socio-economically challenged children of surrounding area. Filix School has very successfully implemented a unique research-based experiential pedagogy over the past decade, significantly improving the academic outcomes of these children. However, the pandemic meant that the school had to provide education by digital means. Thus, ideated that the education provided to the students of Filix school could be leveraged to a larger community. Co-created by school students under supervision, the Filix Innovation Hub has created an artificial intelligence enabled system that provides education to remote areas, including through space systems. Whereas the project is based in India, it may be customized for other parts of the world. This project bolsters the idea that excellent and contextualized quality education with the help of digital transformation can be instrumental to achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. For this project, Nanritam has partnered with a non-profit space policy initiative - ACES Worldwide, reiterating the importance of interconnectedness and the need of space systems in communications between and with remote areas.