Family Literacy

The problem we are committed to solving is the high illiteracy rates among girls and women in sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 500,000,000 million world-wide who cannot read, a majority live in sub-Sharan Africa. Of the 52,000,000 girls in sub-Saharan Africa, 6,000,000 will never set foot in a classroom. 

Our solution is to combine the powerful relationships in families with mobile phone technology to address illiteracy. The two most important factors predicting the outcomes of literacy programs are: (1) an effective reading instruction process and (2) interesting, culturally relevant, challenging material to read. Our content partners--African Storybook initiative and SouthWest (MN) ABE--provide the second component. The Family Learning Company, working with telecom companies, will provide the first.

Our solution could positively change the lives of millions of African girls and women by helping them master their literacy skills. If would affect millions more if scaled globally.

Illiteracy is one of the world’s largest problems and among women and girls outside formal education is an increasingly critical issue. Of the 774,000,000 world-side illiterates, 493,000,000 are women. (The Guardian) Across sub-Saharan Africa, 9.5 million girls will never set foot in a classroom compared to 5 million boys, according to UIS data. Some will start at a later age, but many more will remain entirely excluded with girls facing the biggest barriers. (UNESCO) And there are many studies documenting the relationship between illiteracy and poverty.

There are a number of factors contributing to this problem that relate to our solution:

1. Girls are more likely to be excluded from school attendance than boys: Our solution provides literacy activities on mobile phones, accessible to girls even if they don’t attend school.
2. There are almost no literacy programs for adult women: Our solution provides literacy activities on mobile phones, accessible to women in their homes.
3. Class size often averages fifty learners: Our solution provides individualized attention by providing complete learner control.
4. Literacy pedagogy is hundreds of years old: Our solution provides interactive activities, appealing graphics, formative assessment, team learning, family learning and learner control.

In our solution, girls will use literacy activities associated with African Storybooks and women will use literacy activities associated with real-world readings to learn to read and to improve their vocabulary, fluency and comprehension. Girls and women will then be more able, and more inclined, to read printed and online books for fun and learning.

Each literacy skills package has a number of interactive features:

e-Book

Audio-supported e-books with fluency timer provided in local languages and local accented English.

e-Books for girls will be children’s picture books.

e-Books for women will be real-world reading selections.

Vocabulary Activities

Embedded vocabulary development activities prepare learners to understand the words in the story.

Each e-Book has an array of vocabulary learning games, including the Word Search activity shown above.

Comprehension Questions

Comprehension questions address all of the key comprehension elements:

1.    Main idea,

2.    Background knowledge,

3.    Literal text meaning,

4.    Inference, and

5.    Emotional impact.

Story Writing

Embedded story-writing activities using words and pictures from the story.

By creating their own stories, learners develop their writing skills, gain a better understanding of the material they are writing about, and create the ultimate form of assessment to evaluate their comprehension.

We focus on sub-Saharan Africa because the problem of illiteracy is especially large and English is a lingua franca for many countries. This enables us to provide bilingual literacy programs for young children and English literacy for adults.

Our target population is the millions of girls both in and out of school and the millions of adult women. For girls in schools we provide a rich supplement; for all others, we provide a complete and comprehensive literacy program.

In each country, for each language, we will work with local educators to create the literacy activities. We expect these educators to communicate with the target population, insuring their content is consistent with the needs of the target population.

Our solution will address these needs of our target population:

• Low cost: no uniforms, no fees, no books; just pay for data minutes used
• Availability: activities accessed on mobile phone
• Accessibility: activities accessed anytime
• Can’t travel: no need to travel; activities can be played anywhere
• Different learning styles: graphical, interactive activities that reflect a vareity of learning styles; complete learner control
• Maintain importance of family: activities designed to be done with other family members

Our solution is aligned to the Learning for Girls and Women challenge in that it will:

• Increase the number of girls and young women participating in informal learning by making it easy for them to learn using their family mobile phones;
• Strengthen practical skills and competencies by mastering literacy skills they need to effectively transition from education to employment; 
• Reduce the barriers that prevent girls and young women from reaching key learning milestones by providing them the basic skills needed for further learning; and
• Promote gender-responsive education by having e-Books and readings “starring” girls and women.

Our solution includes three areas of innovation. First, we are a family learning product.

• Our solution includes a literacy product for young girls and a second literacy product for women over the age of fifteen.
• Our solution encourages family members to work together, for girls to help the women in their family and for women to help the girls.

Second, we rely on a pedagogy with a unique set of characteristics.

1. Team Learning: People are social beings and learn best with others, not on their own.
2. Comprehensive Approach: We have thousands of learning activities in reading fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary and writing.
3. Bilingual Literacy: For girls, we include a comprehensive approach to literacy in a native language and in English.
4. Learner control: We give learners complete control over their learning, rather than allowing the computer to tell learners what to do.
5. Formative Assessment: To help learners decide what to do next, we pride them with feedback on everything they do, from whether they answer a single question correctly to how many questions they answered correctly in an activity to how many activities they mastered for each e-Book.

Finally, we are innovative in our delivery model: mobile phones and data minutes.

• Mobile phone companies will license our content to distribute to their customers.
• The only charge for the content will be the data minutes used to play it.
• We will require the companies to provide free minutes to every family.
• Foundations can purchase minutes to provide families free access.

Our solution is both a new application of an existing technology and a new business model. We have an existing technology platform that enables us to rapidly and inexpensively (using educators instead of programmers) create learning activities and just as rapidly and inexpensively deploy them as online activities or mobile apps. Activity templates are at the core of our technology. We define a learning activity as having two components: (1) information and (2) a way to manipulate the information. AN activity template reflects a way for information to be manipulated (or processed). Programmers create activity templates, which are then “filled” with information by educators to create activities for learners. The new application of this existing technology is to create sets of e-books and ancillary learning activities in a variety of African languages.

The new business model is to use existing devices (mobile phones) and existing organizations (telecom companies) to make this new content available to millions of African families. We have abandoned both traditional business models: (1) selling directly to consumers and (2) selling to organizations who give activities to the people they serve. Rather, we sell the activities to companies, making the business model completely self-sustaining. And the companies sell the activities to their customers for pennies per minute, a price that is both affordable to the families and profitable to the companies. This new business model supports expansion throughout Africa, an affordable cost to consumers, and dramatic social change.

The technology has been widely used in the United States to create learning activities for both girls and women. The technology was used to create consumer learning products for Topics Entertainment that sold for over $ 5,000,000. The technology was used to create school learning products that were used in hundreds of elementary schools in the United States. The technology has been recently used to create adult learning products that are being piloted in twenty Adult Basic Education centers in Minnesota. 

The existing Kiswahili content was field tested in a school in Tanzania. Response to the activities was positive: “The activities were definitely engaging. The most engaged learners were the older girls (6-8 years old), who were able to properly do the activities. Despite the fact that younger learners found the majority of the activities difficult, they enjoyed playing them. Response to learner control was also positive: “After having been introduced to the different activities the learners were comfortable to continue choosing the ones they liked the most.”

Our solution is completely research-base, that is, the methods we employ are themselves research-based. We looked to research for instructional methods that have been proven to be successful and then created a technology solution based on those methods: (1) family learning, (2) peer learning, (3) formative assessment, (4) learner control, and (5) avoidance of distracting animations. We have assembled the research upon which are technology is based at this URL: https://www.familylearningcompany.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/ResearchPapers.pdf.

Our theory of change has two components: (1) that our solution can increase literacy skills and (2) that an increase in short-term literacy skills will have an impact on long-term poverty. All of our activities are linked to immediate literacy outputs and all our activities are based on research-based methods. For example, research is clear that people do not become more literate simply by exposing them to books, or even by having them read books. The research (Report of National reading Panel, 2000) argues that students should be explicitly taught skills in reading fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary and writing…all of which our solutions does. According to John Hattie (Influences on Student Learning, 1999), “the most powerful single moderator that enhances achievement is feedback,” which is why our solution incorporates formative, not summative, assessment. Our solution does not rely on computer algorithms to guide learners; rather it relies on learner control because large amount of research on the subject of student agency shows that “the degree to which students learn how to control their own learning … is highly related to outcomes (Visible Learning, 2009). Why is peer learning more effective?  Because at their core, human beings are social learners. The National Mathematics Advisory Panel sites 31 studies in its 2008 report indicating that various forms of peer learning accelerate the learning of mathematics. Even our solutions limited use of animations is based on research. Research by Michelle Donnelly in 2006 found that students who heard stories read out loud were 2.5 times more likely to remember their content than students who experienced them in animated interactive applications.

The second component of our theory of change is universally accepted, but it also has a research base. According to the World Literacy Foundation, illiteracy costs the global economy $1.5 trillion annually. A briefing paper from the UK’s Department for International Development (DFID) looks at how literacy and poverty are connected. Emmanuelle Suso has analyzed 56 Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) from different countries and continents and concluded there is an undisputed that there is a connection between literacy and poverty

Our existing technology Is currently operating in the United States. It is currently serving hundreds of families in a number of pilots. We are just releasing a number of literacy solutions for this market and expect to be serving thousands of families by the end of 2020. Over the next five years, we expect to be serving hundreds of thousands of families in the United States.

The solution we propose will be ready for a pilot during 2020 in Kenya and we expect to be serving thousands of families through that pilot. We expect to be in two or three countries during the following year (adding Tanzania, Uganda, Burundi and South Africa) serving hundreds of thousands of families. Over the next five years, we expect to be in 10-15 countries throughout Africa (adding Nigeria, Ethiopia, DR Congo, Angola, Ghana Mozambique, Madagascar, Cameroon, Ivory Coats and Niger) serving millions of families.

Because our solution is a family learning solution, we expect to impact both the girls in these families (all of whom can access the solution) and the parents. Because our solution encourages adult women to help their girls learn, both the girls and the adult women themselves will increase literacy skills as a result of this collaboration.

Our goals within the next year are to implement the first version of our solution and to create a paid pilot with our first telecom company customer. We already have a relationship with our development partner, the Africa Storybook Initiative (Asb). Asb will develop a way for its web site to automate the process of creating files that our authoring app can use to create interactive e-books and their surrounding comprehension, writing, and vocabulary activities. The Family Learning Company will finalize the authoring program to make it easy to create hundreds of “learning packets” based on African Storybook assets. We will work with local East African educators to create the Kiswahili content.

Finally, we will contract with a telecom company in Kenya for a paid pilot distribution of the content to the telecom company’s subscribers. Our distribution goal within the next year is to serve thousands of families.

The innovative business model enables dramatic growth paid for by the income the project derives from the telecom companies. Each telecom company for each country pays an advance against future royalties to cover the cost of creating the content for one or two languages. This approach permits the project to expand in a sustainable fashion. Additional languages are paid for from royalties from each telecom company. In this way it is possible to scale the project throughout Africa and realistically serve millions of families within the next five years.

There are a number of small barriers. Content needs to be created by local educators and educators need to be located in each country the project serves, often for multiple languages. ASb has already located a group of Kiswahili-speaking educators for the first version of the solution and we expect ASb will be able (with its extensive contacts throughout Africa) to provide most, if not, all of the educators needed for the first 5-10 countries/languages. From that point on, ASb and word-of-mouth should eliminate that barrier.

The second small barrier is contacts with telecom companies. ASb has some contacts, but not as many as with educators. The Family Learning Company founder has worked with many MIT start-ups, some of which are in Africa and have indicated a willingness to provide warm introductions. Once we have a solution to demonstrate, we are confident that even cold contacts at these telecom companies will take our call.

By far, the major barrier is financial. We do not expect any telecom company will be willing to pay for technology development, however low. The solution is based on adapting existing technology and assets, so its cost is extremely low, but we do not expect any telecom company is willing to take that risk. In addition, the first sale is always the most difficult, so having both a finished technology and a finished solution is essential. The project needs an initial infusion of money, and can then be entirely self-sufficient.

The ways in which we plan to overcome the small barriers have already been described in the previous section. The lack of financial resources is the bigger barrier and needs the most explanation. There are two financial barriers; (1) short term and (2) long term. Both barriers have to do with risk. Our innovative business model is to leverage the distribution strengths of private-sector telecom companies. We do not seek donations; rather, we offer (modest) profit. The key to this business model is to reduce telecom company risk.

The short-term financial barrier has to do with reducing risk by providing the first telecom customer a finished product. That is why we are looking to this competition to raise the $125,000 needed to create the finished product and market it to a telecom company doing business in Kenya. The money will be used to enable : (1) ASb to create an automated way to extract from its online books the files needed to create the literacy activities, (2) The Family Learning Company to modify its authoring app for the purpose of creating learning packets, (3) a local group of educators to create the first product, and (4) ASb and The Family Learning Company to market the product to its first customer.

The long-term financial barrier is to reduce risk so that telecom companies will pay advances for content development. Our strategy here is to get donor organizations to help offset the data costs to families, reducing risk to telecom companies.

The two founders are working full-time on our solution. We also have one full-time programmer. There are ten contractors including two artists, two translators, three sales professionals, and three editors.

Jon Bower holds a BA in Development Process from Stanford where he participated in the International Development Education program (SIDEC), and an MBA from Harvard. He has worked in Nigeria, China, England, New Zealand, Australia, Nepal and Malaysia. He has twice served as a member of the Board of Directors of Learning Disabilities Worldwide. Jon has been involved in the EdTech industry for over twenty years. He has been CEO of Lexia Learning Systems and Soliloquy Learning in reading, it’s learning US in technology platforms, Young Broadcasters of America in oral language training, Avant Assessment in language assessment. Two of these companies went through successful sales, and three are still operating. He sits on the Board of Avant Assessment and has twice served as a member of the Board of Directors of Learning Disabilities Worldwide.

Peter Dublin holds a doctorate in Education, and has taught kindergarten, junior and senior high school, and graduate school. He has developed educational software for over forty years, starting with the best-selling Bank Street Writer (over 1,000,000 copies sold). Peter has consulted with the Ministries of Education in Botswana and South Africa on curriculum and technology innovation. Peter has been involved in the EdTech industry for over forty years. He has authored more than twenty textbooks and hundreds of software titles, including fifteen apps in the App Store. He is the designer of the Family Learning Company platform. He was the publisher of the original “Classroom Computer News” (Now “Technology and Learning”).

The organization we currently partner with is the African Storybook Initiative (ASb) in South Africa. We have been partnering with ASb for the past four years. We began our partnership when we used over 100 of their storybooks as the reading component of our Kiswahili Family Literacy product.

A year ago, we began conversations about partnering for the solution we are currently proposing. ASb controls the African Storybook website and its thousands of online storybooks created by African authors in over 100 African languages. ASb will be responsible for creating a utility That extracts the pages from their existing storybooks and stores them in a way that our Make app can access and import them as interactive e-books. ASb will also create a utility that extracts the images from their existing storybooks and stores them in a way that our Make app can access and import them as writing activities. ASb will also be responsible for finding local authoring groups. An example of the type of person that would manage an authoring process in a country is Dr. Cornelius Gulere at the Uganda Christian University, a Lusoga specialist working with lecturers and students to translate and author African Storybooks in a range of Ugandan languages. Dr. Gulere has already agreed to partner with us in this way on this project.

Our beneficiaries are the millions of families in Africa with illiterate women out of school, illiterate girls out of school, or girls in school struggling to acquire literacy skills. There are two conventional business models we do not use. First, beneficiaries are customers and pay us to access pour product. We discard this business model because it is too expensive for the beneficiaries and does not create a sustainable business model. Second, organizations are our customers and give our solution to the beneficiaries. We discard this business model because it has a poor track record and also not sustainable.

Our business model leverages the profit motive and existing distribution channels of private corporations. In this business model, telecom companies are our customers and beneficiaries are paying users. Telecom companies can generate a modest profit and a significant amount of good will offering low-cost access to our solution through data minutes.

We charge each country-specific telecom company a percentage of revenue they generate from our solution and an advance against this revenue to cover content development costs. For this, the company gets exclusivity to the solution in that country. Beneficiaries pay only for the data minutes they use accessing the solution. This keeps the cost low to beneficiaries, yet makes it possible for the telecom company to make a modest profit (since their only cost is a revenue share with us). This business model also makes it possible for foundations and governments to subsidize the cost of the data minutes.

Because of our innovative business model, funding our work and our path to financial sustainability are not exactly the same. Our path to financial sustainability involves one direct source of funding and two indirect sources. First, the direct source of funding is telecom companies. Our business model provides an exclusive license to one telecom company in each African country. The telecom companies pay us a percentage of the revenue it generates from our solution in the form of data minutes attributable to the use of our solution by its customers. Each telecom company also pays us an advance against future payments to cover the up-front costs of creating content for that country. This direct source of funding makes the project financial sustainable for us. The two indirect sources of funding—beneficiaries paying for data minutes and foundations and governments subsidizing the cost of those data minutes—make the project financial sustainable for the telecom companies (which is necessary for the project to be financially sustainable for us).

How we bring money to fund the project (that is, to start the project) is different, because we need to reduce the risk to the telecom companies by offering them a finished solution. This is a one-time cost. We will look to foundations and the Solve Competition for this funding.

Although we, as founders, are extremely experienced in the EdTech industry, there is a great deal we neither know nor understand about providing a technological literacy solution in Africa. Funding is one goal, and our hope is that we can secure partial funding through the competition and the prizes. In addition, our hope is that the Solve community will have a number of peers, other organizations working in literacy, in Africa or both. At VMS I have mentored many ventures with an African focus and if the Solve community is similar, there will be peers from whom we can learn. It would be ideal if some of the experts within the Solve community had experience with, or contacts at, telecom companies. I think we can make a compelling case, but we ourselves have no direct contacts in that industry. It would also be useful to get strategic advice on our plan to seek foundation and government funding to offset some of the beneficiaries’ data minute cost. This effort could take significant time on our part and it would be useful to get a sense of how viable such a strategy is before we undertake it. And, as someone who has been mentoring start-ups at MIT (through VMS) for almost ten years, I would love to have some mentors of my own, for this start-up venture.

We already have an excellent content partner in the African Storybook Initiative. The one other area for which a partner might be useful is the business model. We have designed an innovative (that is, unusual) business model and it would be useful partnering with someone who has experience with business models somewhat similar to what we have proposed. This could be someone with more experience with telecom companies, specifically, or Africa generally. Or it could be someone who has experience with a variety of business models.

Our business model is based upon telecom companies becoming our distribution partners. We see these partnerships being based on national markets, even though many telecom companies in Africa serve multiple national markets. As a result, the business model incorporates exclusive country-wide licenses for telecom partners.

We would like to partner with telecom companies in two ways. First, we want to partner with them financially. We want them to support our short-term content development efforts by providing an advance against future payments to pay for their initial content. In addition, each telecom company will provide us a revenue share of all money they receive for data minutes associated with using our solution. Financially, we partner by our helping them make a profit and by them helping us become sustainable.

Second, we want to partner with them impactfully. We want to help them appreciate that this is a socially impactful solution and that should partner with us in part for the social benefit we both provide. We want to explore with them, for example, providing the solution for free for a certain amount of time. We want to explore with them providing the solution at a slightly lower data rate than regular phone services. We want to explore with them having their foundations (many telecom companies have an associated foundation) or corporate giving arms offset some of the data costs for beneficiary families. In this way, our partnership is both about money and social impact.

Our solution is qualified for the Innovation for Woman Prize because of the two ways that it promotes a world where women’s voices can be celebrated. First, one of the benefits of a partnership with the Africa Storybook Initiative is that they have 600 children’s pictures book that can be used as the basis of the learning packets that are the core content of our solution. As a result, we can select those storybooks where women’s voices are celebrated, both as authors of the storybooks and as their main characters. This is the direct way our solution creates a world where women’s voices are celebrated.

Second, almost everyone agrees that one of the factors preventing women’s voices from being celebrated is the high illiteracy rate among women. Our solution addresses this issue by providing women with the literacy skills they need so that THEIR voices can be celebrated. The solution employs a novel, but proven, way to increase literacy among women: family learning. As women help their children learn, they themselves are learning. This is the indirect way our solution creates a world where women’s voices are celebrated.

Our team will use the Prize to advance our solution by creating our first set of learning packages in Kiswahili and creating the technology platform we will use to create additional content in other languages for other countries. By reducing the risk to telecom companies, we increase the likelihood of them becoming our distribution partners.

Our solution is qualified for the GM Prize on Learning for Girls and Women because of the way it encourages access to learning opportunities for the world’s most vulnerable girls and women. These girls and women cannot, or do not want to, attend physical locations. These girls and women rarely have books. These girls and women often have no Internet access. Realistically, the best (and often the only) way for them to access learning opportunities is through their phone.

Our solution addresses this issue by providing girls and women with access to literacy learning opportunities through their existing phones (and phone service providers). Access for girls is obvious in that the learning activities are designed for them specifically. And “access” isn’t just logistical. These activities are accessible because they have familiar pictures, familiar voices, engaging interaction, and effective pedagogy. Access for women employs a novel, but proven, way to increase their literacy: family learning. As women help their children learn, they themselves are learning. We expect when the women put their children to bed, they’ll get on their phones to continue their own learning. The phone provides access; the family provides encouragement.

Our team will use the Innovation for Women Prize to advance our solution by creating our first set of learning packages in Kiswahili and creating the technology platform we will use to create additional content in other languages for other countries. By reducing the risk to telecom companies, we increase the likelihood of them becoming our distribution partners.

Our solution is qualified for The Gulbenkian Award for Adult Literacy because of the way it increases literacy rates among adults. Our solution employs a novel, but proven, way to increase literacy among adults: family learning. Family learning is an approach to intergenerational learning. It acknowledges the family and its culture as the foundation of learning. Family literacy recognizes the parent as the child's first teacher. According to Ruth Nickse’s early descriptions of family literacy programs, intergenerational and family programs retain adult students longer, enhancing adult outcomes.

The research shows a wide range of benefits for parents from family learning:

1. Parents' attitudes about education improve
2. Parents' reading achievement increases.
3. Parents' writing ability improves.
4. Parents' knowledge about parenting options and child development increases
5. Parents' social awareness and self-advocacy increases
6. Parents enhance their employment status or job satisfaction
7. Parents and other family members become more involved in schools.

As women help their children learn, they themselves are learning. We expect when the women put their children to bed, they’ll get on their phones to continue their own learning. The phone provides access; the family provides encouragement.

Our team will use The Gulbenkian Award for Adult Literacy to advance our solution by creating our first set of learning packages in Kiswahili and creating the technology platform we will use to create additional content in other languages for other countries. By reducing the risk to telecom companies, we increase the likelihood of them becoming our distribution partners.