A Contest to Catalyze Literacy via Mobiles Worldwide
Alliance Symposium in Washington, DC,
which brought together 185 participants from
the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe
and the Middle East to discuss trends and
topics to advance the field.
By Andrea Guzman
A 2013/2014 UNESCO report found that
250 million children across the globe are
not learning basic literacy and numeracy
skills. Of these, 57 million children—a
disproportionate number of whom are from
disadvantaged backgrounds, live in conflictafflicted countries, or are disabled or simply
girls—aren’t enrolled in school at all.
Although participants repeatedly underscored
that technology and mobile devices are
exciting new tools to foster inclusive and
quality education, many also pointed out that
the human element is crucial.
Big Ideas@Berkeley and USAID’s Global
Development Lab are aiming to change
these numbers through the Mobiles for
Reading contest category by inviting
students to develop novel technologybased innovations to enhance reading skills
for youth in developing countries. This
new contest category is sponsored by All
Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for
Development, a partnership between USAID,
World Vision and the Australian Government.
The creation of the category comes amidst
a growing international movement to use
mobile technologies as tools for enhancing
children’s reading skills. Numerous studies
have shown that children who do not
develop reading skills during early primary
education are on a lifetime trajectory of
limited educational progress and economic
opportunities. Meanwhile, mobile devices
are ubiquitous, even in low-income
regions. According to the International
Telecommunications Union, 96.2% of people
on the planet have mobile cellular telephone
subscriptions.
To Rebecca Leege, project director of the
All Children Reading initiative, mobile
technology can be a particularly effective tool
to disseminate local language instruction
materials. “Evidence confirms that children
best learn to read in the language with
which they are most familiar,” said Leege
in an email. “However, many children enter
schools where they are taught in a foreign
language and have little or no access to
mother tongue reading resources, making
it difficult for them to gain the foundational
skills needed to learn to read. This, coupled
with low engagement from family or their
community to support their learning to read,
limits the reinforcement needed to develop a
proficient reader.”
Leege added: “A basic phone or tablet can
provide new and vital mother-tongue reading
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“What matters is the human interaction,” said
Brian Gonzalez, the symposium’s keynote
speaker and director of the global education
sector at Intel. “But not one-to-one, but oneto-many in order to improve the way teachers
teach and children learn.”
In partnership with with All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge
for Development and World Vision, this year’s Big Ideas@Berkeley
competition included a category on Mobiles for Reading. (Flie