'Worldreader' Brings Kindles To Children In Ghana

Former Amazon.com senior vice president David Risher has co-founded Worldreader, a new nonprofit organization exploring the ability of e-readers to improve literacy and education in the developing world.

The Wall Street Journal reports Worldreader has tested its program by distributing Kindles (Amazon.com e-readers) to students in Accra, Ghana. The organization plans to roll out more Kindles in schools across Ghana this fall. Students are given their own personal Kindle, pre-loaded with a number of books, which they can use at school and at home. Worldreader staffers plans to study whether owning a Kindle leads students to read more books during the course of a year, and whether or not their reading proficiency gets a boost over time.

"It's important that this be positioned not just as an educational aid, but as something that can be used for personal pleasure," says Risher. "The long-term idea is that technology will ultimately help create a real culture of reading in parts of the world where that's not been possible before."

Risher believes that e-readers, like cell phones, are central to technological development and educational advancement in countries like Ghana. Especially in rural areas, where there is no infrastructure for desktop computers and landline phones, devices that are portable, require little power, and use the universal GSM network are bringing previously isolated communities into the modern age.

Comments

[LeaderofMen]

10:04 AM on 08/09/2010

How about we provide actual books for them to read instead of products that require electricity. Humans have gotten along just fine for hundreds of years without ebooks.

[ohjodi]

11:23 PM on 08/11/2010

Some humans have had wonderful access to thousands and thousands of books for centuries.

Most humans in the world, however, have not.

[liveandlearn]

01:58 AM on 08/09/2010

this is an interesting idea. i like it, but kindles ain't cheap.

[goodgy25]

01:11 AM on 08/09/2010

why don't we give them deep freezes too so they can store food they can't afford? There's a project to give complicated technological devices to children in very poor countries so they might read more? How are they supposed to download books other than the "preloaded number of books"? Amazon CHARGES for them! Why not just give money to build real libraries and schools with books inside them, and yes - computers hooked up to the internet. But to give people tech that will be outdated and useless in a few years time...waste of time, effort, and money.

[liveandlearn]

01:59 AM on 08/09/2010

hence, the kindles. bookstores are a shrinking business.

[ohjodi]

11:34 PM on 08/11/2010

I can see it........money spent on building a library here and there in Ghana, where most children cannot take the city bus to get to that library. Tens of thousands of kids can share a handful of books. That is until civil or ethnic unrest causes these children and their families to flee....and they won't be able to carry their libraries with them. A computer lab is hard to carry, too. Actually, I have a hunch that a library would be among the first things to burn.

And ALL technology becomes outdated, when compared to all available technology, within a few years. With so little technology available in these countries, a Kindle would remain top-of-the-line for a long time.

And why would Amazon charge them for the ebooks? Not only are thousands free, already, but others can very easily be donated. Try getting a real book to a kid in Ghana for $1.

As for charging the Kindle battery...it would be a cinch to set the Kindle up with solar power.

[Suntio]

09:52 AM on 08/08/2010

Classic problem of putting the cart before the horse. It's hard to focus on reading when your stomach growls for food.

[Wood]

09:17 PM on 08/08/2010

well said.. and it's not about a Kindle.. it's about functioning schools, a functioning society..These students will take our textbooks; though, i wouldn't ship any of that garbage that Texas is prepping to them.

[arusticat]

10:03 PM on 08/07/2010

I don't know if the Kindle is the solution but I am happy to see that there is an interest in distributing books electronically to those without access to a library. I have shipped books to Africa as charitable contributions and it is the shipping costs that make such efforts impractical.

And as you think about shipping books to students/readers internationally, the glut of books that I could choose from here for shipping, well, I wonder how many of them are really interesting to people in 3rd world countries. You think about authors that stand the test of time - how about authors that stand the test of cultural differences? Not many, I think.

[jessiaia]

10:42 PM on 08/07/2010

I would be happier to see them get in there and build libraries. This would actually create jobs and could serve as a community resource beyond books.

The other guy that suggested a Marshall plan for Africa said it all better than I did.

[Ohene]

12:32 PM on 08/07/2010

Thank you and God bless you Mr. David Risher! This effort will pay off. Ghana has great potential. It was that tiny country in West Africa that opened the door to the END of African colonial history and experience. It was her first president, Kwame Nkrumah, who coined the phrase "Neo-Colonialism", "the African Personality", "The African Triple Heritage", etc. Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian, is by far the best General Secretary the United Nations has ever had. Ghana was once the largest producer of the best Cocoa in the world. Ghana within a short space of time managed to produce quality intellectuals and able administrators who served in many post-independence African countries. Today Ghana is among handful countries in Africa where democracy is striving. Ghana was the only African country to reach the quarter finals in the World Cup in South Africa. Ghanaians put a high premium on education. A country like that needs our full support.

[misssooshi]

12:51 AM on 08/07/2010

They're just trying to publicize a sadly out of date machine. Just saw a discussion on Charlie Rose the other night and they are seriously defending this tiny, black and white, underpowered thing.

Underprivileged kids everywhere need something multifunctional and this is not. This may be the only learning device they get for a long time.

I got sick of muting their commercials that echoed artwork from the 20's which only serves to reinforce their obsolescence.

[jabailo]

01:18 AM on 08/07/2010

Bingo!

You can get an Android tablet in K-Mart for $99.

That would be like 9 cents in Ghana.

[hypnotoad72]

09:21 AM on 08/07/2010

Agreed.

Plus, with more educated people, wages can be driven down further...

Altruism is nothing if there isn't a return on investment.

It's the corporate world. There is no such thing as altruism, or else 'globalization' wouldn't have eliminated a single American job in the process.

[David VeLar]

09:10 AM on 08/07/2010

So because they don't have something better, this isn't very useful for them, than, oh lets say, a bunch of old out of date books that some of them probably won't even get.

And because it's an older version of the kindle?

Wow what a spoiled nation we've become!

[hypnotoad72]

09:23 AM on 08/07/2010

A fair viewpoint...

I still think what's going on has more to do with making a future return on investment (see my post above), but I'll be happy to be utterly proven wrong. And time reveals everything.

[AnimalLover6]

11:21 PM on 08/06/2010

How about bringing Kindles to kids on the South side of Chicago?

[jessiaia]

10:48 PM on 08/06/2010

Call me cynical but what a great way to get rid of all the Kindles that are being made obsolete by the new one Amazon unveiled.

I love the idea of giving these students a wider variety of books to read but I think it's horrible to make it dependent on electronic technology, esp. one that is on it's third version in the past what? ten years?

[violettefemme]

09:26 PM on 08/06/2010

I wish more of these programs would at least make the effort to offer these things to the inner city and underprivileged children here in the US...I remember those special laptops a while back, and how pretty much every kid in the world could have gotten one....except American children.

I'm just sayin'.

[hypnotoad72]

09:23 AM on 08/07/2010

Educated Americans will demand a living wage.

[Janice Rawlins]

07:26 PM on 08/06/2010

I think that is great with Kindle and kids and helping kids with reading in other countries... I wish all the best to them...the best idea yet.. for helping kids want to read more and I believe reading should be something that is more strongly pushed here in our country too. It helps a child learn better reading makes a child better at homework because most of the homework involves reading. My son reads alot with homework and I hope they do more here with reading maybe it will get him off the games all day... he may be a 4,0 in school but he will be a freshmen and I am hoping he will start reading books again like he used to when he was younger..