We’ve joined forces with Opera Software to understand how women in Africa use mobile internet. Two studies undertaken by Opera Software and Worldreader have found that women in Africa use mobile internet to empower and entertain themselves. Opera Software ran a survey of 1,500 women and men aged 14 to 44 in Nigeria, Kenya, and … Continue Reading →

What happens when armed conflict robs families of access to books? What happens when stories disappear, when access to narrators and teachers cease to exist or when libraries are destroyed? What happens when armed conflict robs families of access to books? We could ask the 121 million children and adolescents worldwide who are currently out … Continue Reading →

In July, Lidudumalingani was announced as the 2016 winner of the Caine Prize, a prestigious award promoting and fostering new writers out of Africa. Lidudumalingani is from a small village in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa and his winning story, ‘Memories We Lost’, is set in a fictional village similar to the one he … Continue Reading →

Worldreader is all about reading.  And the more we expand our collection of digital books, the more broadly people read. Each month, about 300,000 people read books on our mobile phone apps and another 100,000 people– primarily school-age students– read books on our e-readers.  When we first started, our collection numbered in the hundreds of … Continue Reading →

We recently sat down with Ronda Zelezny-Green, a PhD student in Information and Communication Technology for Development (ICT4D) at Royal Holloway, University of London, to discuss her recent study on Worldreader Mobile usage among a group of girls at a secondary school in Nairobi, Kenya. Her study examines the girls’ app usage in an effort … Continue Reading →

For the last two years, we’ve been running a rigorous study called iREAD 2, examining the impact of Worldreader’s e-reader program on students in Ghana. Today, we are excited to announce the final results of that study. Literacy is a foundational skill that sets up children for lifelong success. Unfortunately, few children in sub-Saharan Africa … Continue Reading →

At Worldreader, our staff is full of avid library fans. Many of us spent our childhood days in local libraries, thumbing through well-worn pages of soon-to-be favorite books, searching through card catalogs to find the newest installments of The Boxcar Children or Sweet Valley High. Some of us even remember how the Dewey Decimal system … Continue Reading →

Our e-reader pilot is off the ground and running in 8 Kenyan libraries! Thousands of children, their families, teachers and adults are benefiting from having access to e-books on Kindle Paperwhites through Project LEAP, and we’ve got the Baseline Report to prove it. The baseline report for Project LEAP, which stands for “Libraries, E-reading, Activities … Continue Reading →

As the proverb goes, it takes a village to raise a child. At Worldreader, we often feel like we operate as part of a global village to provide children with all the tools they need to succeed. Our part in this is clear — we provide books and fundamental tools for building literacy and helping … Continue Reading →

We’ve seen reading levels of kids in our program steadily improve, but now we have even more proof. Since we started our efforts to make digital books available to millions of students in the developing world, Worldreader has been committed to rigorously measuring the impact of our programs and evaluating how e-readers in schools create … Continue Reading →