A Journal of Development Effectiveness study involving Worldreader’s e-readers and digital books in Zambia has shown that the technology encourages girls to read more, improving their literacy and education rates.

Opera and digital reading non-profit Worldreader have joined forces to understand how women in Africa use mobile internet. Two studies undertaken by the organizations have found that women in Africa use mobile internet to empower and entertain themselves.

Launched in 2014, Book Dash aims to make fun, quality books available to children who cannot afford them with a goal of providing every child in South Africa with 100 books by the age of five. Worldreader, together with the Goethe Institut, sponsored the first pan-African event of Book Dash. The event included six authors and six illustrators from Ethiopia, Kenya, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Tanzania, Togo, Zimbabwe, and Uganda.

In July, Lidudumalingani was announced as the 2016 winner of the Caine Prize, a prestigious award promoting and fostering new writers out of Africa. Lidudumalingani is from a small village in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa and his winning story, ‘Memories We Lost’, is set in a fictional village similar to the one he … Continue Reading →

David Pover is an English teacher who taught in Zimbabwe before moving to Barcelona. He talks about the difficulties in shipping books to developing countries, the promise of e-book technology and the challenges that worldreader.org faces.