Thinking more about children and the role that we parents have, it’s heartbreaking to read about the empty classrooms of Liberia (for fear of Ebola) and the tragedy of Nigeria’s abducted girls (for fear of education.) I might be accused of being the man with a hammer to which everything looks like a nail, but to me, both cases scream out for a new approach to getting books into kids’ hands, and to the broader importance of education. Once a child has an e-reader full of books or a cell phone that’s a digital library, there’s no stopping how much she’ll read and learn.

For us, “back to school” is something we take for granted, but for many, it’s a life-changing opportunity. I thank you again for your help getting books to those who have so little. In many cases, this represents your largest charitable gift of the year. We — and the children we serve — are eternally grateful for your support.

David Risher

President and Co-Founder

Worldreader

“It wasn’t great,” Matt says. The Bellews understood right away that actually getting enough books into the library would be a challenge.

“Seeing the shortage of books in that library and knowing about Worldreader, Donna and I made a pretty natural connection,” Matt says. “We decided our next donation would be for e-readers and e-books.”

Fast-forward to 2014 and the Bellews have now sent 100 Kindles and 10,000 e-books to Namitembo Primary School through Worldreader’s “sponsor-a-school” program. And this summer, Matt traveled back to Malawi to see their philanthropy in action.

Matt and the Worldreader Project Managers arrived at Namitembo just before the large box of e-readers did. At the school, he helped prepare the devices and showed the kids how to use them. He spent a lot of his time working with the teachers as they learned how to incorporate the e-readers into their classrooms.

“There was an interesting thing going on with the teachers,” Matt said. “They had some familiarity with the devices because we had sent a couple ahead of time. But when we sat down to train them, they were almost too quiet; very politely asking questions here and there.

“Once they got in front of their classrooms of students though, they were using the e-readers and repeating the material like they had known it forever,” Matt says.

In a matter of hours Matt helped train three classrooms of students who were all immersed in e-reading activities by the end of the school day. Over the course of the week, he was amazed to see the transformation of the students as they mastered the materials. And through all of it, he noted the important role that the teachers continued to play as the kids learned the subtleties of working with a Kindle.

Now back in Seattle, Matt and Donna are looking forward to hearing from Worldreader about progress at the school over the next several years. And Matt, who says the visit was an “invaluable opportunity to connect with the project,” plans on keeping in touch personally with many of the people he worked with.

“You see the difficult conditions and poverty around the school and it can feel overwhelming. But seeing the teachers and leaders there really counters that. It really boosts your confidence in the project,” Matt says.

Traveling to the Field

Many Worldreader donors have visited our programs in different ways. Like Matt, some have attended launches of programs they’ve funded. Others have participated in Vacation Reading School, a fully supported “voluntourism” experience WR provides in Ghana each summer. To learn about how you can fund and visit an individual project in Africa or India, contact brian@worldreader.org.

“What is Worldreader Mobile?”

Worldreader Mobile is a mobile phone app that provides free access to nearly 7,000 e-books to over 250,000 people in the developing world.

“Tell me about your app. Where did it come from? Who is using it?”

It was built and promoted by a company called biNu, our technology partner. biNu has a free application that over 2 million people use to make lower-end “feature phones” (think of something between a flip-phone and iPhone) behave more like a smartphone. After they developed our app, biNu made it appear automatically on all of these phones, and it just happens that many of those phones are in Africa and Asia.

As a result, almost overnight we had 250,000 people each month using the Worldreader Mobile app. Other people are downloading the app and using it outside of biNu too. All together we’ve had over 600,000 users since it was created.

“Sounds great! Why would you need a new app?”

Our current app was designed for low-end feature phones because those phones are very common throughout Africa and Asia. But we also know that smarter phones, especially ones that run on the Android operating system, are becoming the new norm, even in remote parts of the world.

Simply put, our current app doesn’t work well on nicer, newer phones. At the very least, our app can’t offer the features that people have come to expect from a smartphone app experience. Things like annotations, dictionary look-ups, quizzes and social networking simply aren’t possible with our current app.

So, without “smarter” apps, we’re missing out on a huge market of potential readers using “smarter phones.”

“If you had a new app, how many people do you think you can reach?”

Currently, there are 7.1 billion people in the world and 6.8 billion mobile subscriptions, all on different types of phones.

As soon as we have apps that work on some of the most popular mobile phones out there, it’s not an exaggeration to say that Worldreader Mobile could quickly have millions of users, maybe even billions some day.

Of course, first we have to develop the apps, and then get them promoted too. So there’s a lot of work to do.

“You keep saying apps, in the plural. How many apps do you really need?!”

Right now we have four different projects in the works, each at different stages. Each app will reach a different – and very large – group of mobile users.

A while ago, we started working with Nokia to develop an app for their S30 and S40 phones, which number around 1 billion in the world today. Now that Nokia is part of Microsoft, the partnership includes another project: Nokia/Microsoft smartphones.

The third project involves working with a web-browser company called Opera. Again, we’re hoping to develop an app that works on their mobile phone browser called Opera Mini, which is used by over 200 million people.

Finally, as an organization we’re developing a plan for a full-blown Android app; something that will work on any of the many billions of Android phones out there. We may even develop special versions of the app to promote things like girls’ education and women’s empowerment.

These projects will rollout over the next couple of years; roughly in the order they’re laid out here. Assuming we can find the right funders and partners, we could be reaching millions of users on Worldreader Mobile sometime in 2015.

“How can I help?”

For Worldreader Mobile to build its infrastructure, we need people to invest in its potential. For Worldreader Mobile to truly thrive, we need partnerships to help along the way. If you’re interested in supporting Worldreader Mobile or connecting us with people and companies that can, please contact brian@worldreader.org.

“Books from a local publisher will have local names and cultural references that are important when you’re trying to get people interested in reading more,” Nancy says. “For example, we have a book called Kofi Has Malaria, a great educational story for teenagers…and obviously written with an African reader in mind.”

Getting culturally relevant books into the Worldreader library, however, has its challenges.

In many cases, Worldreader is working one-on-one with publishers to digitize books for the first time. In the past four years, Worldreader has helped African publishers digitize thousands of books for the first time ever. These e-books are now available on Worldreader’s platforms, but also for sale on Amazon.com and via the publishers own distribution channels.

“It’s not crazy to say we’ve ushered many African publishers into the digital age,” says Nancy. “It’s a lot of work, but worth an end result of getting good material from a publisher to hundreds of thousands more people.”

Recently, as Worldreader prepares to launch pilot programs in India for the first time, Nancy traveled to Delhi and Chennai to meet with 15 different publishers to better understand and begin to acquire the best e-books to reach specific groups of students and families in India.

“It’s always important to meet face-to-face with people at these companies, but I’m learning that’s especially true in India,” Nancy reflects.

“We can’t pretend that what Worldreader is doing in Africa will work the same in India. My experience has been that publishers in India are more prone to talking business than philanthropy.”

Shortly after Nancy’s trip, Worldreader signed new partnerships with Prabhat, Katha and New Horizon Media; three Indian publishers that will collectively add about 500 new India-centric books to the Worldreader Library, pushing the library total to over 7,000 unique titles. Some of these books are donated from the publishers and others are purchased at a negotiated price.

“Worldreader is very pro-publisher,” Nancy comments. “We don’t want to make arrangements that are going to hurt the book business. We are here to help publishers grow and create thriving cultures of reading in every part of the world.

“There are a ton of really great books out there! We’re just helping the publishers find ways to get them to more people in need.”

Sponsoring Books

Worldreader now offers the opportunity for donors to sponsor a unique collection of books to be added to the Worldreader Library. Your affinity for a particular language or subject matter could help define an entire series of e-books available to Worldreader users. Or you can help translate or digitize individual books for the first time ever. If you are interested in sponsoring your own collection of books, please contact brian@worldreader.org.

These photos span 2009 to 2014 and tell the story of Worldreader’s growth through the size of our stations. The first shows Ghanaian staff member Joseph Botwey with one of our first charging stations. The most recent photo is a full-on charging vault made to hold hundreds of Kindles!