Enabling a future generation of writers

This post was written by Rebecca Leege from World Vision.

When children are acquiring reading skills, good teaching is critical. But just as critical is the opportunity to practice reading. Practice allows children to apply skills learned in class and to expand their vocabulary and content knowledge through reading.

Unfortunately, children’s reading materials are rare in developing countries. When they do exist, they are usually in languages most children do not understand or are at a level far too difficult for primary school students. There are many reasons for this dearth of appropriate materials, but one vital cause is that local publishers and authors lack a simple and efficient way of producing multiple titles in mother tongue languages that are suitable for and interesting to children in early primary school.

This is why (ACR GCD), established in 2011 as a partnership between USAID, World Vision and the Australian Government, is hosting Enabling Writers, a $100,000 prize competition aimed at finding technology-based solutions to improve reading skills for children in developing countries.. The global competition seeks to spur the development of software solutions that allow authors to easily create and export texts in mother tongue languages to help early-grade students to read. The Enabling Writers challenge, powered by InnoCentive, a global leader in crowdsourcing innovation problems, is one of several technology-for-literacy competitions being launched throughout Round 2 of ACR GCD.

Photo copyright Muhammad Ali/World Vision (2012)

After the submission period closes on 1st October 2014, three finalists will receive awards of $12,000 each. They will receive feedback from our judging panel and their innovations will then be piloted and reviewed in three countries with ACR GCD partner programs. The highest performing software will win a grand prize of $100,000.

Solvers’ software should provide the two types of reading materials that early primary school children need:

1. Decodable readers for the earliest stages of reading acquisition that employ words using only the sounds and letters children have already learned.

2. Levelled readers that are controlled for vocabulary, word length, sentence length and other characteristics.

Photo copyright Aklilu Kassaye/World Vision (2013)

Both types of materials can be fiction and non-fiction. Successful software will allow writers to use an easy step-by-step process on a computer or mobile device and create texts that follow tested early-grade reading instruction methodologies. The software should:

  • Work for writers who know a story they want to write or a subject matter they want to present but also provide less prepared writers with existing stories and nonfiction text that they could adapt for their audiences
  • Ensure writers are kept within technical boundaries appropriate for the target reader and reading level
  • Provide directions and prompts in a common national language but allow authors to write in both national and local languages.

For further information about All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development, please visit or follow us @ReadingGCD on Twitter.

Rebecca Chandler Leege is World Vision’s Project Director for their partnership in All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development. Prior to this, she was World Vision US’s Director for Child Development and Protection since 2007. Rebecca also worked with World Relief for four years, initially based in Kigali, Rwanda as their Director of Programs before relocating to their headquarters in Baltimore, Maryland USA as Director of Global Program Operations. She has lived and worked throughout Africa and Asia for over 10 years. Rebecca also spent six years working in the private sector in international human resources.

Innovation out of necessity is alive and well

(This article first appeared on the Virgin website as part of their special feature on innovation and disruption. The original post can be read here).

While much of the West debates the pros, cons, merits and current state of technological innovation, innovators in the developing world just get on with it. And they’ve never been so busy. Innovation out of necessity is alive and well, and on the rise, according to Ashoka Fellow, Ken Banks.

For many of us, innovation is the iPhone, iPad or pretty much anything that comes from today’s high-tech production line. It’s the latest phone, laptop, smart watch or passenger aircraft, and it’s designed to make things easier, quicker, more convenient and, in some cases, just more fun. We rarely question why we feel we need the latest and greatest, why we change our phones every year, or even what the drivers might be for all these high-tech innovations. Who, for example, decided the world needed an iPad-powered coffee machine?

Much of the innovation we see in the developing world, whether the innovators behind them come from there or not, is done out of necessity. They solve very real problems, many of which happen to be faced on a daily basis by many of the poorest and most vulnerable people on the planet. Innovation here isn’t about fast, shiny or modern, it’s about solving very real problems. And many of those problems aren’t going away any time soon.

Entrepreneurs in the West may well be losing the will to innovate, although I’d suggest it’s more about ability and a conducive environment than will. Many face difficulties with funding, highly competitive markets and patent wars, all of which make for challenging times. But this is far from the case throughout much of Africa, where I’ve focused most of my efforts for the past 20 years. Many innovations here are born by the side of the road, or in rural villages without any funding at all. Furthermore, market opportunities abound and patents are the last things on people’s minds. Compared to the West, African markets are still something of a Wild West in innovation terms, and this is precisely why there’s so much focus there.

Innovation out of necessity has given Kenya, for example, a world-leading position in mobile payments. On a continent where hundreds of millions of people lacked bank accounts, mobile phones provided the answer. An estimated 40% of Kenya’s GDP now works its way through Safaricom’s M-PESA system. It’s an innovation success story, and it’s provided a platform for many other innovators to offer everything from pay-as-you-go solar lighting to villagers to automated payment platforms for microfinance organisations. The further (anticipated) opening up of systems like M-PESA will spur even more innovation in the future. This is just the beginning.

When faced with very real problems that in many cases cost lives, innovators in the developing world kick into a different gear. With little funding or resources, it’s innovation in this ‘long tail’ that is most interesting – a place where people innovate out of necessity, not luxury, and as a matter of survival or ethics, not profit or markets. Health is a classic example of these drivers at work.

Six out of the 10 chapters in my recent book, “The Rise of the Reluctant Innovator”, cover health. The issues these innovators address include data collection, genetic disorders, communications between community health workers, patents, access to medicines, and solar energy as a lighting solution for maternity wards. The range of examples shows how broad and complex an issue health is, as well as the sheer scale of the need for its improvement across much of the developing world.

Many others are better placed to comment on whether entrepreneurs in the West are losing the will to innovate. Whatever the outcome of that debate, thankfully this isn’t the case in the places that matter – the places where far too many people still die from perfectly treatable diseases, or fail to reach their potential because of a lack of access to the most basic of education.

To paraphrase former Liverpool football manager, Bill Shankly, in the developing world innovation isn’t just a matter of life or death. It’s more
important than that.