Worldreader

Worldreader

Official Worldreader Logo
Type	Non-governmental organization
Founded	2010
Founder(s)	David Risher, Colin McElwee
Headquarters	San Francisco, California Barcelona, Spain Accra, Ghana Nairobi, Kenya
Key people	David Risher, Colin McElwee
Area served	Ghana, Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Zambia, South Africa, Malawi, Zimbabwe.
Focus(es)	Transforming reading across sub-Saharan Africa and beyond.
Mission	To unlock the potential of millions of people through the use of digital books in places where access to reading materials is very limited.
Motto	Books for all
Website	http://www.worldreader.org

Worldreader is a San Francisco based 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that provides digital books to children and families in sub-Saharan Africa and other developing nations using e-reader and existing mobile phone technology.^[2] Worldreader also works with donors, organizations, communities and governments to develop and digitize local and international books,^[3] as well as manage logistics and support.^[4]

Children and families in the Worldreader e-reader programs have access to materials ranging from hundreds of local African textbooks and story-books, world newspapers, and classic literature from around the world. Students can read books from African authors like Meshack Asare and Chika Unigwe, Roald Dahl, Nancy Drew and Mary Pope Osborne (the Magic Tree House stories), and learn from local African textbooks. Worldreader works with local publishers to digitize culturally relevant content, conducts monitoring and evaluation for impact assessment, and develops reading focused out-of-classroom activities and teacher workshops by working directly with communities and partner organizations.

In addition, Worldreader Mobile allows readers to choose from thousands of books and stories including public domain classics such as Pride and Prejudice and A Tale of Two Cities as well as contemporary fiction from around the world – all on a device they already own: the mobile phone. By giving students and people access to a range of books by both local and international authors, Worldreader wants to empower families and entire communities to improve their education and lives.

Worldreader's headquarters are in San Francisco, California with offices in Europe and across Africa.

History

A student in a Ghana classroom reading from an e-reader with Worldreader co-founder David Risher.^[1] The use of e-readers in this school was funded by USAID and was the first large scale e-reader project Worldreader implemented.

In May 2009, during a trip around the world with his family, Risher saw a library, whose door had been padlocked. He was struck with the discovery that e-reader technology was able to work in the most remote areas of the world, where people have become almost uninterested in reading. Early in 2010, McElwee and Risher founded Worldreader and conducted a small trial in a 12th grade English class at Barcelona's Benjamin Franklin International School.^[5]

In March 2010, the Worldreader team traveled to Ghana and conducted a trial with 20 e-readers at OrphanAid Africa.^[6] Shortly thereafter, Ghana's Ministry of Education granted permission to Worldreader to permit the organization to extend its work across the country.^[7]

In Fall 2010, Worldreader secured several agreements with publishers in Ghana, including Sam Woode, Woeli, Smartline, Sub Saharan, to digitize and ensure that local reading material is centre-stage for students and teachers in the Worldreader programs. The non-profit also signed its first agreement with an international publisher, Random House at the end of 2010.^[3]

On November 21, 2010, Worldreader received official approval from the US Agency for International Development (USAID) funding the evaluation of the Worldreader iREAD project. The agreement was made possible as part of USAID’s innovative Global Development Alliance program, enabling Worldreader to deliver 500 e-readers to six schools and conduct “M&E” (measurement and evaluation) of its work of putting e-readers into kids' hands in Ghana.^[8]

Worldreader was incorporated as a Washington State non-profit corporation in March, 2010.^[9] The same month Worldreader opened its first office in Barcelona. In 2012, the non-profit shared office space with the Internet Archive and in October 2012 opened its San Francisco office branch.

Milestones

2011: First e-reader projects in Ghana and Kenya

• April: Kenya’s Ministry of Education approves Worldreader's work and mission.

• May: Kilgoris Project launched in Kenya. 50 devices for over 100 students in the primary grade levels.^[10]

• July: Worldreader partners with publishing house Young Readers division^[11]

• November: Worldreader hits 60,000 books distributed

• December: David Risher chosen as a Microsoft integral fellow.^[12]

2012: Quarter of a million digital books to children and families in Africa

• February

1. E-reader program launched in Uganda at the HUMBLE school. Expansions at existing e-reader programs run by The Kilgoris Project and Dr. Robert John Ouko Memorial Community Library/GordonFamily ConnectAfrica.^[13]
2. Beta launch of Worldreader mobile reading app for feature phones. Developed with technology partner, biNu, the app allows mobile phone users around the world (many of whom do not own smartphones) to access books.^[14]

• March: Worldreader launches another project in Kenya with partner Dr. Robert John Ouko Memorial Community Library and http://thegordonsinafrica.wordpress.com GordonFamily ConnectAfrica. 400 students and teachers now have access thousands of books via 250 e-readers.

• April: Worldreader delivers 95,000 digital books to children and families in sub-Saharan Africa.

• May: Worldreader kicks off a campaign with support from soccer team FC Barcelona (Barça), asking people to help send 1 million e-books to students in sub-Saharan Africa.^[15]

• September: Worldreader triples the size of its digital library reaching 1200 books. International publishers Simon & Schuster, HarperCollins Publishers (Canada), Egmont UK, Rosetta Books, Hardie Grant Egmont (Australia), and Ripley Publishing donate titles from Michael Morpurgo, Meshack Asare, Roald Dahl, Chika Unigwe, Mary Pope Osborne, and Kurt Vonnegut.^[16]

• October: DHL Express partners with Worldreader to help deliver educational products to existing and future programs.^[17]

• November

1. Amazon.com featured Worldreader on its home page, collecting donations for the organization.^[18]
2. Worldreader selected as a nominee for Chase American Giving Awards 2012.^[19] Worldreader also expands social media presence; Facebook page receives over 34,000 likes.

• December: Worldreader enters a new African country, Tanzania via partners Thanks to Be God Foundation and AfricAid.^[20]

2013: Books for All expands to more countries and adds a new platform   

• February: Worldreader launches iREAD2 e-reader project (sponsored by the All Children Reading grant), a randomized clinical trial in 4 treatment schools and 4 control schools in Ghana. This month also marks the launch of e-reader project within PRIMR Program in Kenya^[21] led RTI and USAID.
• March: Worldreader launches a project in Kibera (Nairobi, Kenya), the second biggest slum in Africa with partner Kibera Girls Soccer Academy (KGSA). Over 150 students and teachers have now access to a library of books using 100 e-readers. 
• April: Worldreader launches Worldreader Mobile, thanks to partner biNu, an App developer that delivers a smart phone like experience to low end feature phones. Worldreader Mobile allows millions of people in the developing nations have access to a library of books, stories and information on health issues in their native language using the mobile phones they already own. As of October 2013, Worldreader Mobile has 184,906 users reading 13,189,078 pages each month, mostly in Asia and Africa, in over 60 countries.      
• May 

1. Worldreader launches its second project in Tanzania. 900 students of Nambala and Nganana Schools have access to 36,000 e-books and teaching materials thanks to Nelson Mandela AIST and Thanks be to God Foundation.
2. FC Barcelona’s Alex Song joins Worldreader as a Books for All Ambassador.
3. Worldreader partners with Hesperian Health Guides, who donated its popular Where There Is No Doctor. Students, families, teachers and community leaders in Worldreader’s programs around Africa have access to easy-to-understand health information they can use on a daily basis.
4. First e-reader project launched at the King George VI Rehabilitation Centre & School in Zimbabwe.^[22]
5. In Malawi, 280 students and 10 teachers at the Namalomba Secondary School have 50 e-readers available in the school’s library, thanks to the support of The Rosemary Pencil Foundation.

• June: Worldreader launches projects in two new countries: South Africa and Uganda.

1. In South Africa, Get Ahead Project School (GAP) and Leacock Foundation partnered with Worldreader to set up a Kits e-reader literacy program to 110 students and 6 teachers.
2. Also in South Africa, about 1,100 students and 25 teachers in Mdatya Primary School can now access digital textbooks, storybooks and reference materials through a library and media center initiative led by the Matthew E. Russell Foundation and Advance Education Inc 
3. In Uganda, 500 students in Naguru Parents School have access to storybooks and reference materials thanks to FOYA Uganda and Otterbein University.

• July

1. Worldreader expands to Zambia thanks to a partnership with Dwankhozi Hope. The program currently caters to roughly 600 children, many of whom are orphans whose parents were impacted by the HIV/AIDS pandemic. 
2. Worldreader partners with Books For Africa to send e-books and e-readers to schools across Africa.

Programs

Kindles in African Schools

As of July 2013, Worldreader has distributed over 662,008 digital books to children, families and communities across 21 projects in 9 sub-Saharan African countries including Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, South Africa, Zambia, Malawi and Zimbabwe. The iREAD project launched in Ghana in November 2010 and delivered 500 e-readers to six schools.^[22] Independent monitoring and evaluation, funded by USAID, has revealed that primary school students receiving e-readers as part of iREAD have shown marked improvement on their English test scores.^[23] The full iREAD report and subsequent reports are available on the Worldreader Learnings page.

More recently, the non-profit partnered with the charitable organizations to bring Worldreader programs to:

• The New Dawn Educational Centre, Kenya
• PRIMR Program, Kenya
• Suzy Peacock Memorial Secondary School, Kenya
• Nambala and Nganana Schools, Tanzania
• Kibera Girls’ Soccer Academy (KGSA), Kenya
• Imbuko Primary School, Kenya
• Heritage Academy, Kenya
• Naguru Parents School, Uganda
• King George VI Centre & School, Zimbabwe
• Get Ahead Project School, South Africa
• Namalomba Secondary School, Malawi
• Dwankhozi Community School, Zambia

In all current and future projects, the non-profit regularly trains the teachers and surrounding communities on the use of the e-reader.^[24]

Mobile Phones as E-Readers

Worldreader continues to explore new ways to bring books to all.^[25] With their partnership with biNu, an App developer based in Sydney, Worldreader has developed a book application for mobile phones, called Worldreader Mobile allowing people in the developing world to have access to a library of books using their mobile phone. Worldreader Mobile allows readers to choose between public domain classics such as Pride and Prejudice and A Tale of Two Cities, as well as contemporary fiction and non-fiction from Zimbabwe, Nigeria, Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, India and other developing nations.^[26] According to biNu and Worldreader, features phones represent one of the largest segments in the global mobile market, with over 5 billion users within the 6 billion mobile subscribers worldwide.^[21] Worldreader Mobile is on 4.5 million mobile phones, primarily in Asia and Africa, with 184,906 active users reading 13,189,078 pages. Worldreader is aiming to reach 10 million by the end of 2013.

Digital Publishing in Africa

In 2010, Worldreader began collaborating with Sub-Saharan publishers EPP, Woeli and Sam Woode to offer content to students in their pilot study alongside public domain works and ebooks donated by publishers such as Random House. Building on the success of that project, Worldreader currently works with over 20 African publishers such as Longhorn (Kenya), Sub-Saharan (Ghana), AmaBooks (Zimbabwe), Readit Books Ltd. (Tanzania), Big Bug Books (South Africa) and Kachifo (Nigeria) to digitize their catalogs.

Worldreader contends that this is a two-way street in fulfilling their mission of bringing books to all: Firstly, relevant content in both English and local languages such as Kiswahili, Gikuyu, Dholuo, Igbo, Luganda, isiXhosa, Twi, and Kinyarwanda is made available to students without the high costs and other limitations associated with print media. Secondly, Worldreader assists African publishers to leapfrog into digital publishing by opening up new markets and promoting expanded access by international readers of African stories.^[27][28]

Key Partnerships

FC Barcelona

On May 24, 2012, Worldreader kicked off a campaign with support from soccer team FC Barcelona (Barça), asking people to help send 1 million e-books to students in sub-Saharan Africa.^[29] Appealing to the students’ love of Barça, some of the team’s biggest names including Lionel Messi, Xavi Hernandez, Eric Abidal and Seydou Keita, are sending encouraging messages to students inspiring them to read more. Students in the Worldreader program receive messages from their favorite soccer heroes transferred directly onto their e-readers. Together Worldreader and Barça want to use the popularity of the most famous soccer clubs to inspire students to continue reading.^[30] Via millionbooks.worldreader.org., Worldreader and FC Barcelona are trying to raise enough funds to send 1 million e-books to the children in Africa and other areas where access to books is limited.

Governance

Worldreader is organized as a 501c3 organization in the United States, and has received a Guidestar Transparency Seal. Its U.S. Board of Directors^[31] consists of: David Risher, Colin McElwee, Charles Brighton, Anne Marie Burgoyne, Harrison Miller and Peter Spiro. In Spain, Worldreader operates as a registered non-profit foundation validated by the Ministry of Education with the registration number 1361.

Co-founders David Risher and Colin McElwee lead the organization from Barcelona, Spain and San Francisco, California. A mix of private social investors, corporate sponsors, and government agencies including USAID funds the organization.^[32]

References