We Love Reading

Reading and literacy are widely recognized as critical—for childhood development, for bringing people out of poverty, for building civil society—yet children in Bangladesh’s Cox’s Bazar district still struggle to access and remain in school due to a variety of factors, from physical barriers to financial struggles.

We Love Reading promotes literacy beyond the sphere of formal education through the simple act of reading aloud. We train people to regularly read aloud to children from their community in a fun way in their local language. By making reading enjoyable rather than a chore, we help establish patterns that prime children to become lifelong readers and learners—enabling them to take more control over their future.

This practice also empowers the readers; many go on to create projects addressing other issues within their community, leveraging their new skills and confidence that small actions can lead to big changes.

Bangladesh has ambitious goals to become a middle-income nation; one of its main paths to doing so is reaching 100% literacy and enhancing the quality of education. Cox’s Bazar in southeastern Bangladesh is one of the poorest and most disaster-affected districts in the country. These are translating to serious underperformance in education, with access to school/attendance and dropout as the greatest challenges its education sector faces. The main reasons for poor access to school and school attendance are natural hazards and transportation issues, while the main causes of dropout are poor finances (85% of children work as of January 2018) and early child marriage. It has the second highest dropout rate (31%) in the country. Furthermore, Cox’s Bazar saw a 25% population increase from the influx of Rohingya refugees. This not only has placed greater pressure on services and the district’s economy, but has led to many teachers and skilled workers leaving local work to join higher-paying NGOs to support the Rohingya, depleting the availability of good teachers. A strong indication of Cox’s Bazar’s lagging education: it ranks 63rd of 64 for reading in primary school, with only 32% of 3rd graders able to read Bangla with fluency and comprehension.

We will collaborate with community-based organizations (CBOs) to train locals from Cox’s Bazar to read aloud to neighborhood children aged 2-10 in easily accessible places. They will only need basic literacy skills, which may incentivize some adults to learn to read.

Poor infrastructure and natural barriers like rivers hamper children from accessing school—these reading circles will be a means through which they can develop critical literacy and cognitive skills. The minimal time commitment provides flexibility to adapt the sessions as they need, to adjust around challenges like storms, poor transportation, and other commitments. Because it is free, financial barriers will disappear. Girls and disabled children especially will benefit, as they struggle disproportionately to access schooling. Critically, it will instill in the children a love of reading and learning.

Through our partnerships, we will determine the need for linguistic variety to serve the groups coexisting in Cox’s Bazar. We will then create storybooks in their language; key to developing a love for reading is reading in children’s native language.

The CBOs can implement the program as part of another project or distinctly. Either way, it will help them reach more people and can be scaled to other districts throughout Bangladesh.

We offer a total solution (We Love Reading Training package) to the CBOs we partner with in Cox’s Bazar. This includes a coach training: a four-day “Training of the Trainers” workshop to train staff to facilitate read-aloud workshops. Staff will then train residents of Cox’s Bazar to read aloud to children aged 2-10 from their neighborhood, all to help the children develop a love for reading. These trained residents become WLR Ambassadors.

The WLR Ambassadors will learn best practices for reading aloud, conceptual grounding in the value and impact of reading to children at an early age, and methods for creating a reading circle where children are read to regularly and exchange books to read on their own. The interactive training will develop leadership, communication, and public speaking skills; most importantly, a mindset of “I can.”

The Ambassadors will receive an Ambassador Bag with a puppet and set of storybooks created by We Love Reading and translated into the most relevant language, whether it is Chittagonian, Bangla, or Chakma. These books are age-appropriate, nonpolitical, nonreligious, and fun. At the end of every reading session, the Ambassador will loan a book to each child to read with their families until the next session. This continues the positive connection the child has begun forming with reading and engages the parents and the community in mutually beneficial activities.

Since the Ambassadors are from the community, they will have stronger ties to and more trust from community members. Plus, all the credit for the children’s success will be attributed to them. This will unlock a greater willingness to participate and an ongoing impact after ending the project, ensuring sustainability and ownership over the program.

Core to the program is our award-winning mobile application, the Global Ambassadors Network (GAN). We use this tool to evaluate the impact of our program, even after we complete a project. Our partners can also use its data for their own reports. Each trainer and Ambassador is registered onto GAN and taught how to report their sessions, share success stories, ask questions, and connect with other members, from Argentina to Vietnam. By interacting with others from around the world, Ambassadors feel as though they truly are part of a global movement.

WLR is innovative at three levels, combining sustainability with simplicity:

1. WLR has the secret sauce for motivating both children and adults to pursue learning because they want to not because they have to. Reading for pleasure has been found to be a more significant factor for children’s cognitive development than parents’ educational level, suggesting the vast potential a program like ours offers.

2. WLR is a basic framework based on shared universal human values to allow it to scale throughout the world while at the same time being flexible to be adapted to any culture or context. The Ambassadors shape the experience to their setting, needs and social norms, empowered to take decisions and become changemakers. Our approach follows the notion that action leads to more action, with readers asking themselves, “If I can open a library, what else can I do?”

3. WLR harnesses technology to serve the cause rather than be the cause. The readers use our mobile app, the Global Ambassadors Network, to connect with others worldwide and track their impact. We recently won the UN Science, Technology, and Innovation Award for its design. Meanwhile, the children read books with a human because we have been able to measure that a child who reads a physical book with another person will more effectively reap the benefits of reading than by reading on an electronic device—intellectually, emotionally, cognitively, etc.

Through the simple act of routinely reading aloud, children in Cox’s Bazar will develop a love for reading that translates into enhanced literacy skills, executive function, cognitive skills, and emotional regulation, all of which combined will change their mindset, support academic success, and empower them to prosper.

We measure that the Ambassadors themselves become viewed as leaders in their community; they often gain support from the community in growing the reading circle and fundraising, and start other projects in the neighborhood. This is possible because people learn not only to read aloud to children, but develop skills and confidence to identify solutions to other issues, enabling them to become social entrepreneurs (demonstrated through evaluation funded by USAID).

WLR is a human-centered, evidence-based method advancing the following Sustainable Development Goals:

• SDG 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all.
• SDG 5: Achieve gender equality and empowerment of women and girls (90% of Ambassadors are women and 60% of children read to are girls).
• SDG 10: Reduce inequality within and among countries.

We collaborate with institutions like Harvard, Yale, and Queen Mary Universities to evaluate impact. In a study we conducted with Brown University and presented at MIT we found that children aged 4–8 participating in our program for six months improved executive function development (e.g., attention control, cognitive flexibility, memory). The effect was particularly significant for children from lower income homes. Children reported that they read more often and were more interested in learning.

• We have reached more than 448,000 children and trained more than 7400 readers.
• In one year, we expect to have reached 41,216 more people.
• In five years, we project to reach at least 703,700 people but hope to reach more than 1,000,000.

Our primary goal is to reach every child in every neighborhood in the world.

We have developed the WLR package to avoid establishing an office in every country and enable the local people to take it up and run with it. This is our model of scale, allowing for individuals to read aloud in their neighborhoods and encourage others around them to as well. The package includes the mobile app, Global Ambassadors Network (GAN), to create a virtual community connecting everyone who is part of the movement from around the world and help them learn from and support each other. The Ambassadors are the core of the program.

With that said, in one year we plan to have GAN fully up and running for all our trainers and Ambassadors.

In five years we envision WLR to be offered in 10 languages (Arabic, English, French, Spanish, Mandarin, and five highly requested languages) to help us reach over 100,000 Ambassadors and over 1 million children, including through a virtual online training accessible by any individual from around the world.

We hope to facilitate this by continuing to develop the program leveraging the findings from our research, in-depth feedback from the participants themselves, and the data and analysis collected through GAN.

We hope to reach our financial sustainability goals in large part by adjusting our business model. We have developed a plan to license WLR to organizations based on an annual fee where they incorporate the WLR program into their services. Funders like USAID and UNICEF provide grants to implement programs like WLR to encourage organizations to adopt the program. We are also interested in exploring leveraging block chain as an innovative approach to our financial model.

By tapping into the international NGO and donor market to buy into our innovative business model of service subsidization, we hope to tackle barriers to sustainably scale the program. WLR wants to partner with these groups to take the mantle and create materials in suitable languages and in culturally relevant ways.

We would like to create the online training program by initially releasing the training in three languages (English, French, and Spanish) and then translating them to additional languages in future phases. We require technical and technological assistance to do so and maintain the app in various regions.

To help with copyrighting, we are looking to reach out to global legal firms.

We hope to reach our financial sustainability goals in large part by adjusting our business model. We have developed a plan to license WLR to organizations based on an annual fee where they incorporate the WLR program into their services. Funders like USAID and UNICEF provide grants to implement programs like WLR to encourage organizations to adopt the program. We are also interested in exploring leveraging block chain as an innovative approach to our financial model.

By tapping into the international NGO and donor market to buy into our innovative business model of service subsidization, we hope to tackle barriers to sustainably scale the program. WLR wants to partner with these groups to take the mantle and create materials in suitable languages and in culturally relevant ways.

We would like to create the online training program by initially releasing the training in three languages (English, French, and Spanish) and then translating them to additional languages in future phases. We require technical and technological assistance to do so and maintain the app in various regions.

To help with copyrighting, we are looking to reach out to global legal firms.

Our program is very limited in Bangladesh. We have one reader who started reading in 2017 after meeting the founder at a conference. She was excited about bringing the platform to Bangladesh, but we have not had the opportunity to expand our presence since that time. The Tiger Challenge is our chance to do so.

Bangladesh is culturally more community-oriented than individually-oriented, which will facilitate the implementation of our program as it too is centered around the community. WLR is a grassroots, community-owned program where Ambassadors can carry the program with them wherever they go and will only need to receive training once.

We will start with a pilot in three areas within Cox’s Bazar. Using feedback from the participants, we will adjust the program to further tailor it to the local context and then then support our partner(s) in expanding it throughout the district and all of Bangladesh. While Cox’s Bazar experiences a host of challenges in education, as outlined previously, most districts in Bangladesh experience similar challenges and would greatly benefit from this form of education. Through our plan to license the program, we will be able to provide subsidies to support further expansion by local NGOs looking to implement the program.

Full-time staff: 14

Contractors: 4

Interns: 2 

Our read-aloud program is a methodology designed, crafted, and adapted by We Love Reading from years of research and implementation. The founder, Dr. Rana Dajani, tinkered with her approach for 3 years prior to founding the organization. She has 25 years of experience in the education sector as a teacher and higher education reform expert, and is considered one of the top 100 most influential Arab women. Even more critically, this is a program created by people from the “developing world” with the understanding that there is no “one size fits all” approach. We created this program to be molded by the setting in which it exists. Our team and founder have conducted trainings throughout the world for 13 years—with people living in refugee camps, urban cities, and remote rural areas. Our team comprises of people with extensive backgrounds in research, teaching, coaching, anthropology, and international cooperation. Our coaches have led their own reading sessions to inform their coaching workshops.

As mentioned, our work and impact are measured through academic research. We also have won multiple awards for the program such as the UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize; WISE Award; Jacob Social Entrepreneurship Award; the Science, Technology, and Innovation Award from the UN; and the IDEO.org best education program for refugees. In terms of our internal strategic management procedures, we have adopted the Balanced Scorecard BSC, are in compliance with IFRS and other international standards, and adopted an ERP system and Quality Management System.

We are currently partnering with the following organizations for program implementation, where they fund and conduct trainings in their areas of operation:

-ACEV (Turkey)

-Plan International (Ethiopia)

-Norwegian Refugee Council (Azraq Refugee Camp, Jordan)

-IRD (now Blumont; Zaatari Refugee Camp, Jordan)

-Save the Children (Jordan)

-Mercy Corps (Jordan)

We also partner with hundreds of local community-based organizations (CBO) around the world, including Reading Viet Nam, a CBO that has single-handedly trained more than 400 readers throughout Vietnam. The WLR Ambassadors around the world are also considered partners, and their reporting plays a key role in improving the program.

We are also conducting research on the effect of our program on the children being read to as well as the Ambassadors with the following universities:

-Queen Mary University of London: improving emotional recognition and decision making

-New York University Abu Dhabi: exploring the feasibility of physiological measures in the study of caregiver-child interactions in humanitarian and fragile settings

-Polytechnic University of Milan: assessing the effect on Ambassadors’ entrepreneurship from participating in WLR

-Brown University: WLR’s influence on children’s cognitive development during preschool years

We previously collaborated with institutions like Yale, Harvard, University of Chicago, the Hashemite University in Jordan, and UNICEF.

Our key beneficiaries are the children and those who read to them. They benefit from our program free of charge, as it is funded by partners and donors. We partner with international NGOs and companies to implement our program. They pay for the trainings, materials and books we create, and this funding sustains us enough to continue providing the program for free to individuals and local NGOs without sufficient means around the world. As we are an NGO, all remaining revenue is put into conducting more trainings.

While we hold our own trainings, we also seek to provide local NGOs with the capacity to train locals on the read-aloud program. They already have an established presence there and know better how to connect with the people and their culture. This allows us to avoid reinventing the wheel each time we come to a new community. It is a simple program they add to their own set of services which also serves to raise more funds for their work and reach more people.

We would like to implement a Service Subsidization Model where we:

• License our program to private schools, NGOs, and community-based organizations. Through this annual license, we will provide trainings, resources, storybooks, and our data management platform for each group to monitor their impact through their read-aloud sessions.
• Obtain funding from other groups like companies’ Corporate Social Responsibility departments and government embassies to conduct trainings and create new storybooks.
• Sell our books in bookstores to individuals and other groups.

The income we would generate from these paths would allow us to implement the program in communities where people cannot afford to pay for the training and materials required to get a reading circle started.

We also plan to concurrently apply for grants that are open-ended to allow us the flexibility to meet more programmatic needs.

We Love Reading is eager to implement its program within the communities that need it most, however most of those communities are difficult to reach. This includes communities in Bangladesh. We have chosen to first work in Cox’s Bazar as its people are most poised to benefit from our program—at the mercy of natural hazards, poor accessibility to and quality of education, increasing need for innovative thinking from its own people—but we are also interested in implementing it throughout all of Bangladesh. The Tiger Challenge grant would not only allow us to implement the program in Cox’s Bazar then scale throughout the country—with books and materials written in children’s native languages—but would support us in creating an effective strategy to reach communities in remote areas in other countries as well through its strategic and operational support.

We are looking to partner with international organizations and community-based organizations who work to improve education, literacy, psychosocial health, and early childhood development.

We want to partner with them as well as governments so that they can implement the WLR program within their geographic scope. Rather than have an office in every country where we manage operations, we can license the WLR program to NGOs and/or ministries on the ground to implement the program themselves. We will provide coach training, accreditation, support, and data analysis and reporting, but want to empower groups who know their communities to deliver the program in the way that best fits those they work with. The business model is built on a service fee paid annually.

Potential partner organizations would be similar to groups such as Save the Children, UNICEF, Mercy Corps, in addition to local NGOs and governments. We also consider education companies like Pearson as an option.