Copy of Spanish Professor Wins Third Graduate XXI Education Contest

Jorge Gallardo won the prize for his proposal to reintegrate young victims of violence into society.

Madrid, Spain, May 30, 2013 – Jorge Gallardo won the prize for his proposal to reintegrate young victims of violence into society.

Spanish university professor Jorge Gallardo was the outright winner of the third GRADUATE XXI contest, an Inter-American Development Bank (BID) initiative designed to prevent children dropping out of school in Latin America. Gallardo, who has a doctorate in Communication Sciences and is a professor at the Camilo Jos Cela University (UCJC) in Madrid, won the award for his proposal for socially reintegrating young people who have suffered from violence.

His project, entitled -Good memories mark the start of a new path-, won the majority of users’ votes on the programme’s website. -My idea involves expressing negative and positive memories, and posting the positive ones on a blog where they can be shared with other education centres all over the world, because this is the wonderful thing about the Internet and its global reach-, said Gallardo.

The international body said that, although access to education in Latin America has improved considerably over recent years, almost half of all Latin American students do not finish secondary school. Gador Manzano, head of the GRADUATE XXI project, said that initiatives such as this one -give all sectors of society a voice and the chance to actively participate in efforts to combat the school dropout problem and make a good-quality education possible for all-.

The objective of GRADUATE XXI is to involve Latin American citizens in improving the educational system and to increase the numbers completing secondary school education in the region.

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