As a global literacy organisation, we’re committed to putting learning apps in the hands of children who would otherwise never learn to read. Literacy links to everything from poverty levels, gender equality and access to health.
That’s why we’re excited to announce our partnership with the World Bank through their Development Impact Evaluation Department (DIME) to study how online campaigns can encourage parents from low-income households to download learning apps, including our literacy apps. As smartphone ownership and usage continues to increase in developing nations, there is greater potential to scale our impact and reach even more children.
In 2018, only 27% of adults in India and 25% of adults in Sub-Saharan Africa owned smartphones. By 2025, this number will jump to 50%. Increased ownership results in more impactful and cost-effective online communication campaigns, drastically increasing the number of children from rural and developing communities who could learn to read.
Our learning apps are free to download. With the falling costs of data, it costs less than $0.10 to advertise our apps to parents and educators in Nepal, Bangladesh and Kenya. This demonstrates the incredible potential to scale cheaply and effectively.
Through testing our apps with Syrian refugees in Jordan, we've found that 22 hours of exposure to our literacy apps, like Feed the Monster, is equal to two months of literacy learning in a well-resourced school environment.
Our apps are highly interactive and provide real-time data to assess literacy levels. This increases the apps' efficiency — after four years of using our literacy apps as a supplementary learning resource in Geluksburg, 100% of the 4th graders could read for meaning in their mother tongue, isiZulu, and 90% in English.
“We are very excited for this partnership with the World Bank and DIME. We believe our collaboration will drive unprecedented growth in downloads and translate into more kids reading!”
Want to help us reach illiterate children in even the most remote locations in the world through our free literacy apps? Partner with us, and let's help rewrite the narrative on global literacy together:
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