Abu Dhabi: Students who complete the Arab Reading Challenge will receive a signed personalised letter by His Highness Shaikh Mohammad Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Vice-President and Prime Minister of the UAE and Ruler of Dubai.
To complete the challenge each student must read 50 books in one year.
The Arab Reading Challenge was launched by Shaikh Mohammad with the aim of a million students in the Arab world reading 50 million books to encourage sustainable and regular reading among students.
The challenge will encourage students to take part by providing cash prizes and incentives to students, families and supervisors who participate.
The student who comes first will get 150,000 (Dh367,295-Dh550,923) towards his or her university tuition fees and $50,000 (Dh183,648) to the student’s family. Dh1 million in prizes has also been allocated for Arab schools with the highest participation.
The awards for outstanding supervisors are valued at $300,000 (Dh1.1 million), and there are incentives for schools, as well as awards for students valued at $1 million.
Mohammad Abdullah Al Gergawi, Minister of State for Cabinet Affairs and head of the higher committee of the Arabic Reading challenge, announced in the first committee meeting that took place in Abu Dhabi on Tuesday that Shaikh Mohammad will be sending the letters.
Al Gergawi said Shaikh Mohammad ordered that two streams — local one and an Arab one — will be put in place for the challenge to encourage most public and private schools in the country to take part in the challenge.
Al Gergawi stressed that the challenge is not a temporary campaign aimed at encouraging reading. It is more of a consistent project that will continue throughout the academic year as instilling a culture of reading starts at a very young age.
He said the committee has already started printing five million notebooks, which will be distributed to students across the Arab world to help them summarise the books they read.
Minister of Education Hussain Al Hammadi, who was also present at the meeting, stressed the importance of participation of all the schools across the country. He said he hopes that the students in schools in the UAE read five million books and says this will be possible with the participation of parents.
