Mobile Youth Skill-Based Literacy program (MYSBL)

Our solution facilitates youth employment by bringing adaptive work-readiness content to low-literate youth in Ghana, thereby supporting the work of vocational institutions, state curricula, and government initiatives.

The project aims to improve employment skills and literacy among low-literate youth. Our solution will provide disadvantaged youth with leveled skill-building content via mobile phones. The primary objective is to combine the learning of a useful, productive skill with the learning of literacy. Reaching them on their mobile phones, we provide them with curated reading material at the right level for them to develop both employment skills and reading acumen, both of which will contribute positively towards their job prospects.

In Ghana, government initiatives, such as the Ghanaian Informal Apprenticeship Training (IAT) and The National Vocational Training Institute (NVTI), have identified a gap in employment skills among youth. Starting initially in Accra with a view to scale throughout Ghana, Worldreader intends to cater a digital content platform for low-literate youth aimed at reinforcing and improving their level of literacy through leveled content built around vocational skills. We will work with local content providers to curate vocational and life skills building content, adjust it to appropriate reading levels and serve it to the users via Worldreader’s reading platform. Moreover, Worldreader will build a reading level detection system that will, depending on user's reading ability and progress, gradually adjust the complexity of the text served and skill trained.

By working together with a selected local youth education initiative in Ghana, our goal is to co-create the solution that other youth education programs can pick up, adapt and use without additional involvement from Worldreader, thus ensuring the organic scalability.

Building on the success of our established mobile reading application that reaches 20 million people worldwide, we want to enable those without the necessary literacy levels to attain the skills and experience they need to gain, not only vocational employment in their respective communities, but lifelong learning skills to self-improvement and future study.

According to UNESCO, 114 million people worldwide aged between 15 and 24 are illiterate. However, literacy is loosely defined with varying states using varying definitions and testing criteria. A far bigger number of disadvantaged youth falls into the category of “neo-literates” -- a group of learners who have followed a basic literacy course, but did not have an opportunity to develop these skills further, thus becoming prone to slipping back into illiteracy (Abadzi, 2003). The exact number of neo-literates worldwide is unknown as they are often counted as either literate or illiterate. Neo-literates, also, tend to be unemployed or underemployed.

In 2014, UNESCO published a study called “Reading in the Mobile Era” that used Worldreader usage data to conclude that mobiles are already in use for long-form reading, because of convenience & cost-efficiency. Additionally, by not revealing what is being read, mobile reading provides the reader with privacy needed to avoid social stigmatization based on the content they are consuming. Adult literacy experts (Abadzi, Robinson-Pant) agree that for a neo-literate person to progress along the literacy spectrum, one needs to provide them with reading materials at their reading level that they will find beneficial to their daily life and success.

Our target outcomes:

1)   Improve literacy levels among disadvantaged (low-literate) youth

2)   Improve life skills and work readiness

3)   Increase number of disadvantaged youth benefiting from the Ghanaian government employment schemes

Our solution will benefit disadvantaged youth and young adults traversing the spectrum between literate and illiterate in Ghana that:

a)    own/have access to a data receiving mobile phone and

b)   want to improve their employment potential in line with Government vocational schemes

Our solution will offer free vocational and life-skills content at the user-appropriate reading level. It will be deployed in partnership with a selected local vocational-training organization.

1) Collecting baseline, midline and end-line reading comprehension data from vocational training attendees.

2) Measure the speed of reading by tracking the amount of words that appear on users' screen and time they take to complete the page. - Improved literacy levels among disadvantaged (low-literate) youth

1) Collecting and reviewing data reports from the vocational training partner organization.

2) In-app user surveys - Improve life skills and work readiness

1) After-pilot In-app user surveys with most active users

2) Vocational training organization reports. - Increase number of disadvantaged youth benefiting from the Ghanaian government employment schemes [Longer Term Outcome]

It improves learners’ literacy level by relying on their motivation to acquire a practical skill.

It automatically adapts the reading level of the materials as the user progresses through the skill-building content.

It prioritizes privacy and protection from social stigma toward low-literate youth. 

It is catered toward Government incentivized vocational training.

It is free, accessible and offers a user driven route to self-improvement and lifelong development.

It works on smartphones and feature phones.

It is developed by the team who has successfully launched a mobile reading service that reaches 20 million people in Africa.

Our solution will benefit from the existing culture of integrating HCD research findings into our work and our products. Throughout our work across sub-Saharan Africa and India, Worldreader iteratively evaluates project outcomes with the goal of identifying an optimal success scenario that, during the pilot, is built into the existing Worldreader mobile learning platform.

To successfully adapt our existing technology and work to the needs of disadvantaged low-literate youth; we are planning to take the participatory “discovery-ideation-prototype” approach. We will co-create the solution together with the disadvantaged youth to suit their needs and aspirations.

Our solution will be accessible on mobiles phones. Taking advantage of its ever-increasing market, we will turn this ubiquitous product into a learning tool available anywhere, anytime and in total privacy for free.

To achieve the best possible results and ensure that our solution is delivering the service disadvantaged youth needs, we are planning to partner with a local vocational/adult literacy organization and work with them to integrate our solution into their curriculum. Once the partner and beneficiary co-creation of the solution is complete, we will make our solution available to everyone in Ghana for free.

This solution’s sustainability and scalability are ensured by its reliance on locally available and contextually-appropriate technology - the mobile phone. Additionally, by working with local organizations to integrate our solution into their work Worldreader aims to ensure that the ownership of the solution is transferred to local stakeholders.

To grow the concept beyond the original scope of the proposal, Worldreader will seek to engage and encourage the local private sector and local governments to sponsor new skill- and literacy- building content in order to address skill-gaps not included in the original pilot.

Once the concept is proven, Worldreader will focus its efforts on scaling the solution by advocating regional government vocational initiatives and employment schemes to adopt and adapt the Worldreader solution to their needs and goals.

Mobile learning is still a relatively novel concept in the education sector and the lack of understanding of its potential by local stakeholders might require additional advocacy on the part of Worldreader in order for the solution to succeed.

The existing gender digital divide and gender gap in access to the internet, mobile ownership, free time work duties, etc. might be a limiting factor to ensuring the benefits of our solution is equitably spread across gender lines.

Social stigma associated with illiteracy among youth and adults has been known to demotivate those afraid of admitting a lack of readership ability.

http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/themes/icts/m4ed/mobile-reading/reading-in-the-mobile-era/

https://mobileecosystemforum.com/2016/09/07/meffys-2015-winners-12-months-on-worldreader/

https://www.gsma.com/newsroom/press-release/gsma-announces-winners-of-the-2016-glomo-awards/

By becoming a member of the SOLVE community, we wanted to put forward an issue that for many years remained invisible - youth and adult illiteracy. 

By joining forces with other members of the SOLVE community, we are confident that one of the remaining challenges - illiteracy - can be solved through smart mobilization of technology that everyone already owns - the mobile phone. Additionally, we were hoping to tap into the pool of shared knowledge and jointly raise funds to pilot a solution that could help millions of young adults pull themselves out of poverty. 

• Book publishers across Africa. 
• Opera Software enables us to reach millions of people through their browser.
• Amazon and Microsoft are our technology partners.
• Pearson/Project Literacy is our learning partner. 
• The Ministry of Education in Ghana endorses our efforts in Ghana. 
• Many other companies, foundations, and individuals support our work.

No identified competitors. Wattpad might be an indirect competitor to our app, but not the approach.