From 20 to 27,210 Kindles in Africa

When a Worldreader team visited OrphanAid Africa in Ghana with a box of 20 Kindles in 2010, we didn’t expect to spark a reading revolution or to forge a critical partnership with Amazon. We started off with a simple idea to test if e-readers filled with books could be an effective solution to tackling illiteracy in Sub-Saharan Africa.

We’ve now deployed 27,210 Kindles to 396 schools and 109 libraries across 16 African countries. Kindles filled with e-books have proven to be a powerful tool for schools and libraries in the global south.

Content Matters Most

One of the things we realized early on is that it’s very important to bring readers books that are going to inspire them and that they can connect to. With this in mind, we’re incredibly excited to announce that our partnership with Amazon is growing with more content—storybooks, nonfiction, and romance titles—added to our Worldreader Library to serve our programs.

Amazon Publishing and the Amazon Literary Partnership have donated over 130 titles to our library. Over the course of the year, these titles could reach tens of thousands of new readers across 20 libraries in Uganda and Zambia.

The donated titles range from children’s storybooks to romance, and nonfiction. The authors are as diverse as their stories. On Two Feet and Wings, by Abbas Kazerooni, is a memoir about the author’s escape from Iran at age 10. Dee Lestari, a former Indonesian pop star tells the story of friendship turned to love in her title Paper Boats. Julia Drosten offers readers a bold heroine to admire in The Lioness of Morocco.

Profit/Nonprofit Partnerships Have Never Been More Important

We are so grateful to Amazon for their support and willingness to join us in connecting readers with books and books with readers. Beyond donating thousands of new and refurbished Kindles to our e-reading programs, Amazon has also supported us with cloud grants from Amazon Web Services and customer donations through the AmazonSmile program. Whispercast technology allows our team to manage the distribution of thousands of books to schools, libraries, and communities. Now, with this new addition of titles to our library, we can continue to work alongside Amazon to make digital reading a reality for people all over the world.

Read more about our partnership with Amazon and this new addition to our library in Amazon’s latest piece, A World Where Everyone Can Be A Reader.