Family Literacy in Africa

The problem we solve is high illiteracy rates among children and adults in sub-Saharan Africa. Of the 500,000,000 million who cannot read, a majority live in sub-Sharan Africa. 

Our solution combines the powerful relationships in families with mobile phone and tablet technology, starting in Zambia and Malawi. The two most important factors predicting the outcomes of literacy programs are: (1) effective reading process and (2) culturally-relevant readings. Our content partners--African Storybook initiative, Tukuka (in Zambia) and Ladder to Learning (in Malawi) --provide the second component. We provide the first. The combination of appropriate content and effective instruction will be enhanced by family learning.

Our solution could positively change the lives of hundreds of thousands of Zambian and Malawian children and adults by helping them master their literacy skills. If would affect millions more if scaled throughout Africa.

Despite several decades of focusing on improving access to quality education for ALL children, learning outcomes remain disappointingly low. According to the World Bank, fewer than half of the world’s school-aged children are learning to read on grade level. Since more than 85 percent of a child’s brain is already developed by age 6, investing in high-quality pre-primary education may be an effective way of addressing the learning crisis. While the evidence on the importance of early learning opportunities is compelling, 175 million boys and girls globally are not enrolled in pre-primary education during these vital years of their lives. In low-income countries, nearly 8 in 10 children – 78 percent – are missing out on this opportunity (A World Ready to Learn. UNICEF. 2020).

One-half of the pre-primary school-aged population live in conflict-affected states; however, humanitarian aid investments in pre-primary are meager. COVID-19 has further exacerbated the crisis, as millions more children worldwide have missed out on early childhood education (ECE) due to the closure of childcare and early education facilities. Investment in pre-primary education is declining globally. Current ECE spending in low-income countries provides only 11 percent of the resources needed (A World Ready to Learn. UNICEF. 2020).

In our solution, preschool children will use literacy activities associated with African Storybooks and adults in their families (parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles) will use literacy activities associated with real-world readings to learn to read and to improve their phonological and phonemic awareness, reading comprehension and fluency, vocabulary development, and writing. Girls and women will then be more able, and more inclined, to read printed and online books for fun and learning.

e-Book

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

e-Books for children are children’s picture books and for adults are real-world readings.

Phonics Activities

Vocabulary development develop phonological and phonemic awareness.

Vocabulary Activities

Vocabulary development activities prepare learners to understand high-frequency words.

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

Comprehension Questions

Comprehension questions address all 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 writing skills, gain an 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 children and English literacy for adults.

Our target population is the millions of preschool children and the millions of adults in their families. For children, we provide a rich initial literacy experience; for adults, we provide a comprehensive literacy program.

In each country, we will work with local partners who communicate with the target population, ensuring the content is consistent with the needs of the target population.

Our solution addresses these needs of our target population:

• Low cost: no uniforms, no fees, no books
• Availability: activities accessed on mobile phone or preloaded tablets
• Accessibility: activities accessed anytime
• Can’t travel: no need to travel; activities can be played anywhere
• Different learning styles: graphical, interactive activities reflecting a variety of learning styles; complete learner control
• Maintain importance of family: activities designed to be done with other family members

Family learning research demonstrates that the power of family relationships can provide the motivation needed to get both children and adults to spend the years it takes to become fully literate.

Our solution is aligned to the first two inter-related dimensions in that it will:

• Increase the engagement of learnings through interactive activities, learning control, formative assessment, and family learning;
• Include strategies and tools for parent support through family reports, parent advice videos, and an adult literacy product for parents; 
• Include strategies and tools for peer interaction by supporting multiple simultaneous logins;
• Include strategies and tools for guided independent work with formative assessment, learner control and extensive help; and
• Enable access to quality learning experiences in low connectivity settings using mobile phones and preloaded tablets.

We ae testing dual language (English and Spanish) version of First Literacy in the United States by Raising a Reader (MA). There are fifty families using the online version and fifty families using preloaded tablets. There are between 200-300 adults and children in Massachusetts using the product. We will collect internal data and responses to questionnaires when the pilot ends in June.

We will be starting a test in Kenya in July in a number of church literacy programs in Nairobi and a number of rural areas. We expect over 500 families to take part in the test, amounting to between 1,000-2,000 adults and children. In Kenya we will use internal record-keeping data to test efficacy and usage. We will also be testing The Beautiful Tree hypothesis that poor families in the developing world will pay affordable amounts of money for high-quality educational software even when there are free alternatives.

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

• Our solution includes a literacy product for children and a second literacy product for adults in their families.
• Our solution encourages family members to work together, for children to help the adults in their family and for adults to help the children.

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

• Family Learning: People are social beings and learn best with others, not on their own.
• Comprehensive Approach: We have thousands of learning activities in phonological and phonemic awareness, reading fluency, reading comprehension, vocabulary and writing.
• Bilingual Literacy: For children, we include a comprehensive approach to literacy in a native language and in English.
• Learner control: We give learners complete control over their learning, rather than allowing the computer to tell learners what to do.
• Formative Assessment: To help learners decide what to do next, we provide 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 preloaded tablets.

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

Our existing technology Is currently operating in the United States and Kenya. 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 2021 in Zambia and Malawi 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 children in these families (all of whom can access the solution) and the parents. Because our solution encourages adults to help their children learn, both the children and the adults themselves will increase literacy skills as a result of this collaboration.

We have six categories of specific, measurable indicators we are using to measure our progress.

1. Efficacy: Each product is organized into subjects and levels; we refer to a subject at a level as a “skill level.” For preschoolers, for example, there are three subjects and twelve levels, or thirty-six subject levels. Within the app, we keep track of how many skill levels a user has mastered, which is how we measure efficacy. We will measure the average number of skill levels mastered over the first six months of use and over the first year of use.
2. Number of users: We will measure the number of users, since each user has a unique login name. During the initial year of the solution implementation, we expect tens of thousands of users; over five years, we expect millions of users.
3. Family participation: We can measure the number of families and how many family members in each family. We want to measure both these numbers.
4. Use: For each user, we keep track of total time they have used our solution.
5. Number of countries: Toi measure the greatest impact, we not only want a large number of users, but also a large number of countries.
6. Purchases: We will test our Beautiful Tree hypothesis by measuring the percentage of families that purchase prepaid minutes and the average numbr of prepaid minutes they purchase. We will also measure the number of mobile apps purchased.

The two founders work full-time on our solution. We also have one full-time programmer and ten contractors. 

Our partners in Malawi and Zambia each have three staff members and two contractors working on content development. Some staff members will continue working on disseminating the solution after the content is finished.

Jon Bower holds a BA in Development Process from Stanford in International Development Education and an MBA from Harvard. He has worked in Nigeria, China, England, New Zealand, Australia, Nepal and Malaysia. He has been a member of the Board of Directors of Learning Disabilities Worldwide. Jon has been in the EdTech industry for over twenty years and CEO of Lexia Learning Systems and Soliloquy Learning.

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 in the EdTech industry for over forty years.

Rugare Zimunya is a social worker as well as education enthusiast. She has extensive work experience in development work, particularly early childhood development, education and literacy, as well as child protection. She is a firm believer in educating not only children, but families and communities as well. This has been her approach in the work she does and it has shown to have better and far-reaching outcomes.

Patience Silungwe Khembo has six years' experience as a grassroots community leader in education. She is a champion of literacy improvement and leads Ladder to Learning, an award-winning organisation that has improved the reading skills of over 1000 students and provided reading resources to over 4000 students in Malawi. 

Our approach to building a diverse, equitable, and inclusive leadership team has a direct and an indirect component. The direct component involves the leadership team itself. It is comprised of four people: two from the United States and two from Africa, two from a for-profit company and two from nonprofit organizations, two men and two women, two experienced and two younger, two white and two black. This enables us to build a diverse and inclusive leadership team. We deal with building an equitable leadership team by allowing each member of the leadership team to take responsibility for specific tasks: business plan (Jon), technology (Peter) content development and dissemination in Malawi (Patience) and content development and dissemination in Zambia (Rugare).

The indirect component involves supporting SOLVE’s core values of optimism, partnership, open innovation, human-centered solutions, and inclusive technology in our solution itself. Optimism is reflected in the high expectations we have for our users. Partnership is reflected in family learning. Open innovation is reflected in learner choice and formative assessment. Human-centered is reflected family learning. And inclusive technology is reflected in making the solution affordable.

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, to speed up the development of our first solutions, and the prizes, to expand our solutions to Nigeria, South Africa and Arabic-speaking refugees.

In addition, our hope is that the Solve community will have a number of peers, other organizations working in literacy or 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.

Becoming a part of the SOLVE network might provide us contacts at telecom companies or people who can introduce us to their contacts. It would also be useful to get strategic advice on our plan to seek foundation and government funding to fund our initial scaling efforts.

We are hopeful that experts within the SOLVE and MIT networks can help us think through the unique aspects of our business plan: (1) creating a new market category, family learning software, (2) utilizing unsustainable and sustainable revenue to create sustainability, and (3) testing the hypothesis that poor people in developing countries will pay affordable amounts of money for learning software that they perceive to be of high quality even though free alternatives exist.

We already have excellent content partners in the African Storybook Initiative, Tukua and Ladder to Learning. Another 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 expertise is not in marketing, which is why we have engaged a branding expert to help us in the U.S. market. We need support in a variety of areas (branding, marketing strategy, social and global media) as it relates to First Literacy in Africa. Branding, for example, is driven by our value proposition. When we develop that for the U.S. market, how do we modify it for the African market? We could, of course, do that ourselves, but the reason we have hired an experience branding consultant for the U.S. market is the same reason we need support in adapting that value proposition to a different market.

We need similar support in expanding our client base. We have a number of strategies, but it would be helpful to work with someone who has implemented those (or alternative strategies) in Africa. We have local partners, but their expertise is in providing literacy services, not expanding a client base.

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.

We consider literacy to be one of the foundations for refugee resilience, self-reliance and integration. We have a solution that can enhance literacy skills in the short term (for adults) and in the long term (for children). Our solution for refugees has all the advantages described in other parts of our application: (1) low cost, (2) effective, (3) accessible, (4) family-strengthening, and (5) scalable.

We plan to focus on Arab refuges for a number of reasons: (1) there are millions of them, (2) they speak a common language, (3) the problems they face are immense, and (4) they are scattered across many continents. 

We would use the $100,000 grant for two basic purposes. First, we would create an Arabic version of First Literacy. This requires enhancing our technology platform to support Arabic, finding children’s picture books with Arab people and situations, and (3) finding a local partner to provide translation and recording services. 

Second, we would use the rest of the $100,000 grant to create a pilot program. The pilot program would support three forms of access: (1) online, (2) mobile phones, and (3) preloaded tablets. Online access will be used by face-to-face programs that already have physical locations, hardware and support staff. Mobile phone access will be used by families with mobile phones and access to the Internet. Preloaded tablets will be used by families who have no hardware or Internet access. The purpose of the pilot will be to demonstrate efficacy for future large-scale implementation funding.

We consider literacy to be one of the foundations for smart, safe, and sustainable communities around the world. We have a solution that can enhance literacy skills in the short term (for adults) and in the long term (for children). Our solution for smart, safe, and sustainable communities has all the advantages described in other parts of our application: (1) low cost, (2) effective, (3) accessible, (4) family-strengthening, and (5) scalable.

We plan to use the $150,000 prize to expand our First Literacy solution to six additional languages in two of the most populous countries in Africa:

Nigeria (210 million)

Hausa            59 million       30%

Nope              58 million       30%

Yoruba           42 million       20%

Igbo                40 million       20%

South Africa (60 million)

Zulu                12 million       25%

Xhosa             8 million         15%

 The cost per language is low because all that is needed is finding local partners to translate and record.

 We would use a portion of the $150,000 grant to create a pilot program. The pilot program would support three forms of access: (1) online, (2) mobile phones, and (3) preloaded tablets. Online access will be used by face-to-face programs that already have physical locations, hardware and support staff. Mobile phone access will be used by families with mobile phones and access to the Internet. Preloaded tablets will be used by families who have no hardware or Internet access. The purpose of the pilot will be to demonstrate efficacy for future large-scale implementation funding.

Our solution is qualified for the Innovation for 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 preloaded tablets. 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.

We will use the Prize to create a pilot program. The pilot would support mobile phone and preloaded tablet access in Kenya. Mobile phone access will be used by families with phones and Internet access. Preloaded tablets will be used by families who have no hardware or Internet access. The purpose of the pilot will be to demonstrate efficacy for future large-scale implementation funding.

Dio not qualify.