Worldreader and the Technological Leap
By Madison Hartman
David Risher walked into an orphanage in Ecuador and found a feeble attempt of a library with chains on the door and a lost key – he knew something had to change.
Risher knew that the orphanage was not an anomaly in a world where 781 million adults and 126 million youths (ages 15–24) are illiterate. He was inspired to bring access to books, in the form of e-books to developing nations where the average percent of youth literacy is 12, according to a UNESCO study.
Five years later, the former Amazon and Microsoft exec runs Worldreader, a non-profit that provides e-readers to schools in developing African nations and created a mobile app to disperse the information farther than just the schools he can reach.
Risher chose that area of the world to begin his literacy movement because those nations were and remain in dire need of help with catching up to Western literacy rates. More than 50 percent of schools in Africa have few or no books to speak of, according to the Southern and Eastern Africa Consortium for Monitoring Educational Quality.
Although it’s just a start, Worldreader has had a significant impact in a short amount of time. Since opening their doors in 2009, the nonprofit has disseminated books via Amazon Kindles and a mobile application to more than 223,000 people in 27 countries.
“So many children have no access to books but I think if you can reach those kids who are and will be readers the amazing thing to me is you’re building a generation of readers,” said Allison Rich, an ambassador for the company. “You’re helping share a culture of literacy.”
Rich, who volunteered with Worldreader in their Barcelona office made a trip to Tanzania with a delegation to launch two new programs and see what their work looked like on the ground.
“There were two schools and an entire community supporting them and there was one of those terrifically inspiring moments where the Prime Minister stood up and said:
‘We can afford the price of technology, we cannot afford the price of another illiterate generation.’
It was a powerful statement in a really amazing country,” she said.
Worldreader isn’t just changing the lives of children in these nations either, one of the most vital parts of the organization is providing content that is relevant to the readers. The e-books and mobile app are not full of solely American tales – though you will find the celebrated works of the late Roald Dahl.
The publishing wing of the nonprofit noticed that some of the stories the students liked best were local fairy tales and books in other languages, so they pursued local authors and publishers and purchased their work to be included in the programs.
“Just the fact that they’re building probably the most culturally relevant digital library in the world, it’s a massive undertaking,” Rich said.
But the Worldreader team believes they can do it, even partnering with the Clinton Global Initiative last month and embarking on a new project to build libraries in the developing nations.
“To have it right there in their hands is powerful and I think you can’t underestimate the power of the volume of books,” Rich said. “To me it’s sort of a limitless possibility that digital provides that is so powerful.”
