By Jennifer Baljko

As our Director of Digital Publishing Elizabeth Wood pointed out, something’s caught our eye recently: Authors are so excited about Worldreader, they’re telling their friends about us.

That’s how we met Sylvia Vardell, an author and professor at Texas Woman’s University School of Library & Information Studies. Her colleague, poet Janet Wong, made the introduction (Read Janet’s post here).

Sylvia and Janet collaborated on Poetry Tag Time, an electronic-only poetry anthology for children featuring new poems from 30 contemporary poets. They donated the book, which launched April 1, to our e-reader program.

When asked why she wanted to get involved with Worldreader, she told us about her experience as a Fulbright Scholar at Zimbabwe University and in local schools shortly after the country’s independence. Continue Reading →

By Susan Moody

If someone asks you to go hand out 440 e-readers, you might think that after, say 100, it could start to feel mundane.  On the contrary, every single time we handed a student an e-reader, it was as if we were handing someone raw power.   One of my favorite moments was when Barbara asked a class how many books could fit in the classroom.  When kids started yelling out “thousands!” she asked if they could carry all those books in their arms.  Of course they shook their heads no.  Then she said, “Today you will leave the room more powerful than when you came in….you will be holding an entire library in your hands!”

For documentation purposes, we took head shots of 400 children whose lives were changing at that very minute.  As I looked at the students who were holding power and possibilities in their hands, I wondered about where these e-readers were going to take them.  David wrote yesterday about the amazing teachers, and one thing we encourage teachers to do is to let the kids to take e-readers home with them so that the entire community benefits.   While we can monitor the effects of e-readers in the classroom, it is harder to measure how e-readers benefit the community as a whole.

One day after we had finished up in the classroom, we went into the market to grab some food.  Zev happened to look over and see a group of 5 kids clustered around something.  Upon closer inspection, we realized that it was one of our students, Augustina Kesewa at Adeiso JHS, reading The Monkey and the Crocodile to her friends.  It was a shining moment for us!  It’s the essence of what we are trying to accomplish—a culture of reading in a country where literacy rates are low.

The other day I wrote about how inspiring the 400 students participating in the pilot study were, but what about the millions of others who don’t have books?  At Kade Senior High a 17 year-old boy came up to me holding an e-reader.  I asked him how he was feeling, fully expecting to hear him say something along the lines of: “so excited about my new e-reader!”

“Very sad,” he said.  When I asked him why, he waved the e-reader he was holding towards the classroom where we had just spent the whole morning and said, “This is my friend’s e-reader… but I did not get one in my class. Am I not important?” he asked me angrily. “You are important–these students are selected randomly and if we can prove this works, many more will get e-readers,” I answered.  “It will be too late for me,” he said, “I graduate next year.”  I mentioned in a previous post that those kids stole a piece of my heart.  And I mean both Augustina, newly empowered and sharing her e-reader with friends in the market, and this boy whose name I sadly don’t know.  Worldreader is working hard for both of them.

by Susan Moody

The other day I was reading an article in The Economist, and the following statistics made an impact on me: 75% of the world’s 4.6 billion cell phone users live in the developing world.  And only 18% of people in the developing world have access to the internet.  This is a staggering difference, and one that highlights how e-readers, which use the widely available GSM network that cell phones have so nicely put into place, can be effective in the developing world.  Today’s e-reader penetration in the developing world is not even 1%.  Africa has a billion people and there are quite possibly less than 10,000 e-readers there today.  Just  thinking about what we are going to be doing in Africa and imagining the possible impact is enough to keep me awake at night!

Every single day we are reminded of how bringing “Books to All” is an ambitious project.  In one of a few similar stories last week,  Zev encountered some electrical snags in one of the schools in Ghana which was making teacher training a bit challenging.  David, Colin and Zev are on never-ending overseas skype calls wrestling with the tedious details of uploading books on each of the Kindles.  All of us are working long and tough hours–it is obvious to me that  it is the people dedicating their time that will make Worldreader’s mission a reality.  Just like the Kenyan proverb says….Sticks in a bundle are unbreakable. It’s a good thing our bundle of sticks keeps growing with awesome folks!

We are thrilled to announce two members to the Worldreader team, one based out of Barcelona and the other on the ground in Ghana, both incredibly talented and will make a huge impact on our mission.  Alex Sulzberger is our new Director of Technology- Ghana and has 15 years of experience in computer hardware, networking, web-application development, network management as well as satellite, radio and fiber optic communications.  In addition, he assisted with sound IT expertise in implementing professional communication solutions for the UN, UNDP, as well as ISPs and Telecoms in West Africa.  He has been the CEO of Ecoband Networks, a connectivity solution provider in Ghana.  We couldn’t think of a more perfect person to head up the complicated Tech issues in the weeks and months ahead.

Barbara Hummel is our new Director of Development.  A true bookworm at heart, she was a news producer and writer at NBC-TV, and a senior executive at several marketing communications firms, including Porter Novelli International.  Prior to relocating to Europe, she founded and was principal of the Axiom Communications Group. Barbara earned her BA at Princeton University, and pursued doctoral studies in English Literature as a Century Fellow at The University of Chicago.  She comes on at a perfect moment, right before end-of-the-year giving.

Teacher training is moving forward very well (more to come on that) and soon the Kindles will be in the hands of the children.  In just a few weeks the entire team will be flying down to Ghana together to kick off the iREAD pilot.  Stay tuned!