Worldreader, a market-oriented, not-for-profit NGO, is making subsidized e-readers available in parts of Sub-Saharan Africa and already seeing improvements in literacy rates.  That’s just one of the many positive results that Dr. Jonathan Wareham, a member of Worldreader’s board of directors and Vice Dean and professor of Information Systems at ESADE – Ramon Llull University in Barcelona, Spain, discussed last week during a presentation at the World Bank headquarters here in Washington, DC.

Dr. Wareham and others at Worldreader are concerned about the growing book famine in Africa.  According to a World Bank study conducted in 19 sub-Saharan African countries, only one of those countries, Botswana, “had anything close to adequate book provision in schools”.  Using e-reader technology which can hold more books than most school libraries have in such countries — and with no added distribution costs — Worldreader has launched several pilot studies in schools in Ghana, Kenya, and Uganda.  As of now, over 75,000 e-books have been distributed wirelessly to over 750 students.

The pilot study in Ghana, called iREAD, which received financial and research support from USAID, compared the rise in literacy rates over the course of one year for three groups of students: a group given e-readers without training on how to use the devices, another that was given out-of-classroom pedagogical interventions, and a control group without e-readers.  Literacy scores for students with e-readers and no training improved 12.9% vs 8.1% of the control group, and students with e-readers and additional training improved 15.7% vs 8.1% of the control group.

Results from the study have proven the efficacy of the technology with the programs to support it and Worldreader plans to expand the Uganda initiative by doubling the number of students with e-readers within the next year.  Besides improving student literacy scores, the project team also expects to see improvements in adult literacy rates since many of the students share the devices with their families and communities.

Unlike device-based projects such as the One Laptop Per Child program, Worldreader doesn’t produce its own e-reader — so far, it only distributes Amazon’s Kindle.  Dr. Wareham describes Worldreader as device agnostic.  “There’s no real need to be publicly aligned with either Apple, or with Amazon, or with Android — it doesn’t matter.  What matters is bringing literature into the classrooms and as the devices converge and the prices drop, there will be more options to choose from.”

Also unlike most device-based projects, Worldreader invests manpower and on-the-ground support to ensure project sustainability.  With the approval and support of government officials and the Ministry of Education in each country, the project so far works with teachers, students, and community leaders to provide training on how to use the the devices and make certain that the technology is fully understood and valued.  Though high breakage rates and incidents of theft remain a concern for project implementation, Worldreader believes that providing more training on how to care for the devices, building relationships within each community to promote the device’s educational value, and discouraging theft will help to lower these rates.

Worldreader is looking to build on the success of the pilot studies by partnering with other organizations to expand to an estimated total of 10 projects in 2012.  Dr. Wareham said that scaling remains to be a major challenge for the project but plans are underway to provide organizations with what he termed “Worldreader-in-a-box” — kits that will enable training programs to be developed where Worldreader project implementers are not able to go.  In addition, the organization is working to expand an ePub platform that allows local authors’ works to be published and accessed on e-readers, creating opportunities for local authors and offering literary works that can help to foster national identity.