Family Literacy in 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

Phonics asctivities 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.

Two of the three members of the team live in, and reflect, the communities the project is designed to serve.

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. 

Dr. Peter Dublin is President of The Family Learning Company and the Team Lead for this project. He has been developing learning apps for over forty years, including the first learning app to sell 1,000,000 copies (The Bank Street Writer).He has consulted with the Ministry of Education in South Africa on curriculum and the Ministry of Education in Botswana on technology integration. He has managed the development of the content and the technology platform that is the basis for this project. He has worked with Rugare and Patience to develop the Nyanja and Chichewa language versions that will be used in this project.

Together with our partners, we have been able to create two African language versions of our First Literacy family literacy software with no outside funding. With these existing products as our base, we are applying to solve for a number of reasons. First, we need funding to create pilot programs in each country. Each of the partner organizations (and The Family Learning Company, as well) have invested time to create the products, but the pilot requires the purchase of pre-loaded Android tablets…and that requires funding.

Although I am extremely experienced in the EdTech industry and Rugare and Patience experienced at running face-to-face literacy programs, there is a great deal none of us know nor understand about providing a technological literacy solution in Africa. 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.

Part of the goal of this project is to create a sustainable source of revenue for the two partner organizations. One path towards sustainable revenue is licensing the content to local telecom companies. Becoming a part of the SOLVE network might provide us contacts at telecom companies or people who can introduce us to their contacts. 

Our plan to create sustainable sources of revenue is multi-faceted, but none of us have experience implementing any of the proposed strategies It would also be useful to get strategic advice on our plan to seek foundation and government funding, to license to other nonprofits, to work with church groups and other providers of afterschool programs, to explore relationships with local entrepreneurs as ways to fund our initial scaling efforts.

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 goals this year are to implement our solution in both Zambia and Malawi and to create a paid pilot with our first two telecom company partners. We already have a relationship with our development partners and expect to have all content developed by summer, 2021. Both Tukuka and Ladder to Learning will, starting in fall, 2021, begin to work disseminating their solutions to “traditional” sources, such as their own programs, programs run by other nonprofit literacy organizations, churches, and so forth. These face-to-face sources will enable the project to gather efficacy data on both the content and the pedagogy of the solutions.

Finally, we will contract with telecom companies in Zambia and Malawi 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 charging families affordable amounts for prepaid minutes. This innovative business model is based on the extensive research in James Tooley’s The Beautiful Tree, which proved that poor families in the developing world will pay affordable amounts of money for high-quality educational services even when there are free alternatives. This approach permits the project to expand in a sustainable fashion, including additional languages in Zambia and Malawi and additional countries. In this way it is possible to scale the project throughout Africa and realistically serve millions of families within the next five years.

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 number of prepaid minutes they purchase. We will also measure the number of mobile apps purchased.

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).

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) concluded there is an undisputed that there is a connection between literacy and poverty.

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 using local existing literacy-oriented non-profit partners.

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, telecom companies provide the activities to their customers for free, and families pay an affordable amount for prepaid minutes, making the business model completely self-sustaining. This new business model supports expansion throughout Africa starting with those families with mobile phones and Internet access, an affordable cost to consumers, and dramatic social change.

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.

Our beneficiaries are the millions of families in Africa with illiterate adult, illiterate children out of school, or children in school struggling to acquire literacy skills. The products we provide our beneficiaries are the adult and children’s literacy products that are components of our First Literacy software solution.

Our business model is to create sustainability; the only defensible strategy for creating sustainability is by combing sustainable and unsustainable revenue. What is unsustainable revenue? Grants provides unsustainable money, because they require current effort and pay people for that current effort. If you want more unsustainable money, you work more to get it (for example, apply for more grants). Sustainable pays people for their past work; customer payments provide sustainable revenue because you don’t have to work more to generate more revenue

Our business model incorporates both unsustainable and sustainable revenue. We will seek grants (including applying for two of the SOLVE 2021 prize funding opportunities). The logical role for unsustainable revenue to sustain First Family Literacy is to use it to increase the population served by increasing the number of solutions. The costs for creating new language versions are one-time costs, particularly suited to unstainable revenue sources like government and private foundation grants.

Our path to sustainability has two components: (1) a short-term component and (2) a long-term component. The short-term component includes unsustainable revenue in the form of grants. These grants will be used to scale in other countries by creating new content (and in the case of Arabic, enhancing our technology, too).

The short-term component includes unsustainable revenue in the form of government contracts. These contracts will be used to scale in the countries we currently serve by selling existing content and to scale to new countries by selling new content.

The short-term component also includes unsustainable revenue that results from partnerships. A partner can provide unsustainable revenue from government agencies and private foundations can purchase preloaded tablets. A partner can aid through distribution of the online version through their own face-to-face efforts. A partner can aid through marketing by communicating the existence and value of the mobile app and prepaid minutes.

The long-term component involves sustainable revenue in a variety of forms: (1) licensing the online versions of solutions to governments and non-profit organizations with a literacy mandate, (2) selling inexpensive mobile apps to consumers, (3) selling preloaded tablets to governments and nonprofit organizations serving families in low-connectivity settings, and (4) selling prepaid minutes to consumers.

This strategy will create a source of sustainable revenue that can be used to crease the population served by increasing usage of the initial three language versions and ALL subsequent versions. Profit generates revenue to be used to expand usage which generates more profit to be used to expand usage even more…and on indefinitely. And creating a source of sustainable revenue creates a sustainable organization not dependent exclusively on unsustainable revenue.

We have had success generation revenue from government agencies. At the end of 2021, we received a $200,000 contract from the Department of Education in New Mexico. The contract included 2,000 family licenses to our Family Literacy Software (English and Spanish). In February of 2022 we have been told that we have been awarded a contract for $100,000 from the State Department of Early Childhood in New Mexico for additional licenses to our Family Literacy Software.

As a result of these initial successes, we have started working with a number if school districts in South Carolina on proposals to both the State Department of Education and a number of regional Housing Authorities to provide families in South Carolina with inexpensive Android tablets preloaded with our Family Literacy Software. Preliminary reviews of our proposals have been encouraging.

We have joined the Newchip Accelerator in Austin, TX, which focuses on helping startups raise capital. We have “graduated” into their Investor Ready track and expect to begin meeting with potential investors this month about our $500,000 raise.

We have partner organization in Kenya (Westerkit Ventures) that has begun selling “hours” to families. They have arrangements with a number of churches running afterschool programs who sell access to Kiswahili Family Literacy by the hour (for pennies) and share the revenue with our partner (who purchases licenses from us). This opportunity is in its early stages but has the potential of becoming a model for our partners in other countries.