NABU

Worldwide, 250 million children under five are not meeting their developmental potential because they lack adequate cognitive stimulation in early childhood. In order to build early literacy, access to mother tongue storybooks in the home are essential. In addition, in order to learn vocabulary and build linguistic skills,  children need opportunities to formulate and express ideas, receive feedback, and engage with caregivers in responsive and reciprocal interactions. NABU is uniquely positioned to provide these essential literacy resources. Our free low bandwidth reading app is currently serving 350,000 families in Haiti and Rwanda with access to culturally appropriate storybooks. In addition, we have trained thousands of community-based Reading Ambassadors, who can empower caregivers in book-sharing. Caregiver-child book-sharing will ensure more equitable classrooms by providing children with supportive home literacy environments. NABU is providing inclusive and equitable access to literacy, ensuring every child can read and rise to their full potential.

Worldwide, 250 million children under five (43%) enter school unprepared to learn. They lack the vocabulary, sentence structure, and other basic skills that are required to do well in school. Children who start behind generally stay behind – they repeat grades or drop out altogether, deepening the global literacy crisis and perpetuating a cycle of poverty.

One reason children do not achieve their potential in terms of language development and emergent literacy is that they do not have access to linguistically stimulating home environments. The availability of books in the home and the quantity and quality of parents’ reading engagements with their children are consistently associated with children’s cognitive and language development, school readiness, and achievement. 

Investing in children early in their development has high returns because early childhood is a period of rapid growth and development. In particular, exposure to mother tongue culturally relevant storybooks has a direct, positive, causal impact on children’s vocabulary and language skills. Access to story books, combined with caregiver engagement, can help children achieve the necessary literacy gains to rise to their full potential. If all children were able to read by the time they reached 10 years old,  171M people would be lifted out of poverty.

Our solution addresses the systemic causes of illiteracy by (1) hiring and training local creators to rapidly produce culturally relevant mother tongue children’s books across key knowledge domains through the Authentic Book Creation (ABC) Lab; (2) publishing this content for free on our nabu.org reading app, and in print where needed;  (3) empowering and supporting caregivers to read with their children through the Bridge To Literacy (BTL) program, led by community-based Reading Ambassadors. 

NABU integrates digital technology in the creation and distribution of mother tongue books, as well as in engagement in reading activities to increase literacy rates. We have a simple reading app, optimized for Android, that enables anyone to download books for free. Behind the scenes, we also have a Content Management System (CMS) that enables us to show you the most relevant books, depending on where you access the app. In addition, we track  the success of  our Reading Ambassadors by assigning each one a code, which they enter when they  connect with a family, enabling us to track the impact of their interactions with families on reading activity (for example, how many pages were read that week). 

Our target population are children between the ages of 3-10 years old, who currently have little or no access to fun, engaging storybooks in a language they speak or understand (40% of children globally), therefore are at an increased risk of dropping out of school or achieving low levels of literacy and poor educational outcomes. Our target markets are in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia where literacy rates are the lowest globally. 

We see first-hand the transformative impact of the NABU.ORG reading app, as for many children it is the first time they have seen themselves reflected in the pages of a storybook. Evidence demonstrates that there are marked gains in literacy when children learn first in languages they speak and understand. Additional benefits also include improved cognitive development, improved self-identity, increased access and equity, and stronger parental involvement in children’s education. These benefits are amplified by the presence of a supportive and engaged caregiver who can create a literacy-rich environment for the child. Caregivers will be provided with all the resources they need to foster fun and easy literacy experiences with their children. NABU empowers caregivers to drive up the literacy gains of our target audience. 

To increase the engagement of children between the ages of 3-10 NABU has taken a three pronged approach: 1) we provide fun and engaging culturally relevant mother tongue reading materials; 2) the nabu.org app is free, accessible with offline capabilities and has the potential to reach children in remote areas; 3) empowering and supporting caregivers to ensure “parental” support and guided independent work. Our proposed solution is to pair access to NABU’s reading app with empowering caregivers by giving them the tools, skills, knowledge and prompts to create literacy-facilitating interactions both online (in NABU app) and offline (sms prompts).

NABU is at  a growth stage of development, as we have now proven the concept in Rwanda, and replicated the model successfully in Haiti. NABU is the fastest growing edtech solution in Rwanda, with 317,172 app downloads since launch in 2018, and we are on track  for 1.2M users this year. Engagement and retention is incredibly high, with 124,808 active readers in the last 30 days. In Haiti engagement was even higher, (before we had to suspend growth due to civil unrest). The deep reading engagement is due to NABU’s community-based model of Reading Ambassadors who are trained and incentivised to support families in actively engaging in literacy activities together, on mobile devices they already have at home. We have brought together a team of external researchers who are validating our assumptions in fast-cycle learning sprints,  and our team in Kenya poised and ready to grow.

NABU is an award-winning female founded team, bringing renowned researchers, technology, and community development leaders together to accelerate children’s literacy, at scale. Our innovative approach centres on the hypotheses that culturally relevant mother tongue texts are an essential bridge to literacy for children in marginalized communities. There is substantial evidence supporting mother tongue learning as one of the most cost effective interventions in early grade reading. Yet no other solutions focus on providing speakers of underserved languages with a complete early grade reading collection for children, as well as support for their parents and caregivers. NABU is a leading publisher of mother tongue books, and through the Authentic Book Creation (ABC) Lab we have created a powerful format for scaling this approach, providing limitless opportunity for creativity within a sound pedagogical framework. NABU’s content reflects themes consistent with children’s own sociocultural experiences and amplifies marginalized voices. Culturally relevant mother tongue reading materials result in a greater motivation to read and have impacts on literacy achievement, including phonological awareness, comprehension, recall and fluency. With successful proof of concept, we now have the opportunity to go even deeper, empowering Reading Ambassadors to ensure that caregivers are not only accessing NABU, but are actively invested and engaged in essential literacy activities with their children. In doing so, NABU is creating literacy-rich environments and a culture of reading for historically underserved children. We expect the solution to have a catalytic impact on literacy gains, as well  as sociolinguistic pride, self-esteem and social cohesion.

NABU has the highest adoption of any literacy and education app in our current markets, with over 350,000 downloads since we launched, and growing exponentially. Our user base consists of 120,000 unique active monthly users, which we define as a user who has logged into the app and read a book at least once in the last 30 days. 

By the end of this year we are on track to reach 1.2M downloads, and within 12 months we will convert 50% of those to families who are reading together for at least 5  minutes per day, 3 times per week, through the successful implemention of this caregiver-child Bridge to Literacy solution. 

In 5 years, we project to be directly and meaningfully increasing literacy gains for 3.5M families across East and Central Africa, the Philippines and Indigenous and Native American communities in Australia and the US. 

As a tech-enabled organization, our data collection is both qualitative (user surveys, focus groups) and quantitative (real-time analytics of anonymized user data). NABU will measure the impact of this project by tracking within-person longitudinal literacy gains across time using a Likert scale, app usage data, reading comprehension scores generated via gamification and demographic variables collected upon sign-up in line with privacy regulations. NABU is currently tracking progress metrics such as:

Content: # of books created and published, # languages, # authors and Illustrators trained

User engagement: # active readers, time spent reading, # books completed, # of pages read.  

Literacy gains: % increase in literacy on in-app formative literacy assessments and games, progression to new reading levels within the app.

Caregiver engagement: amount of time caregivers read to children/ week, # of literacy activities caregivers do with children/week, #sms notifications sent to caregivers

NABU has an international staff, most of whom are located in Rwanda, Haiti  and Kenya, with the remainder in the USA and Australia.

Full- Time: 9

Part-Time: 2

Contractors: 12

I, Tanyella Evans, have spent my entire career in global education. After living in Uganda as a teacher, and building a school for 3,000 children in Haiti, I co-founded NABU because I had seen first-hand the growing penetration of mobile, and I wanted to have a bigger, scalable impact through technology. I believe I bring strong strategic and creative thinking to the team. In 2013, I found my co-creator, Isabel Sheinman, an incredible connector, and we successfully  seed funded NABU on kickstarter with $100,000! Taniya Alexander, our third co-creator brings legal skills and an operational mind, joined us in 2015. All of us have similar life experiences that lead us to this work. Taniya’s parents fled ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka when she was an infant. Isabel’s family fled the Cyprus conflict in the 1970’s. My grandfather, a Black Jamaican and one of nine children, came to the UK as part of the windrush generation and established his family, overcoming inumerable racial barriers to become a loved and respected teacher. We are a team who have stayed the course for over 7 years, because we believe in this mission and we have seen the way that NABU is transforming lives. We have built NABU on the values of connection, understanding, creativity and tenacity. As descendants of refugees and immigrants,  we experience our extraordinary education as a huge privilege, and a gift we must ensure all children have access to.

Diverse teams of varying racial, gender and ethnic makeup produce better impacts. They perform better financially, gain a competitive edge, experience less employee turnover, and offer greater benefits for those they serve. NABU leadership reflects the diversity in the communities we are serving. Our Directors are Tanyella Evans (female, White/Caribbean), Taniya Benedict (female, Tamil Sri Lankan/Australian), Michael Ross (Male, Australian), Christopher Thompson (Male, African-American) and Amos Furaha (Male, Rwandan).

 Without leaders who reflect the diversity of these communities, education organizations are not operating at optimal performance, and they may not be developing solutions that effectively address the needs of the populations they’re working to serve. Our solutions are created in consultation with our local teams, stakeholders and extensive consultation with communities. We conduct needs based analysis and research prior to implementation. Each of our programs have been adapted successfully from our pilot. Our in-country teams are composed of qualified and experienced local staff who led NABUs distribution and engagement. NABU’s mission is to empower marginalized communities through literacy, this is reflected in our full time, part time and contracted staff. 

NABU also has a diverse and collaborative global Board who are raising the core funding for the organization, and working together between Board Meetings on key initiatives to help the organization achieve its objectives.

In order to achieve our long-term goal,  to solve the global literacy crisis by 2030, we need more exposure and visibility. Marketing is essential to a non-profits success and fundraising opportunities and ultimately NABU wants to obtain more potential funders whether that be people, corporations or foundations. MIT Solve has access to networks and audiences that could potentially be interested in supporting our mission. This support could be financial or through mentorship and skill development.  

This is also achieved through establishing new partners and connections which we believe MIT Solve is ideally situated to facilitate. 

 Secondly, at NABU we highly value research. Our ability to be more impactful relies on the data collected and analyzed as well as new knowledge in the education and technology fields. MIT SOLVE has access to experts and researchers and can provide NABU with a wealth of knowledge. We have a newly established research arm, and would greatly benefit from developing a robust and comprehensive monitoring and evaluation plan to be able to measure long-term literacy gains. 

Lastly, support for non-profits does not solely exist in monetary value. We understand the importance of mentorship, and consulting with experts. MIT SOLVE is a renowned award that supplies the network and support we can draw upon as our model grows and iterates.

As a tech-based non profit organization, our data collection is primarily quantitative, real-time analytics of anonymized user data. To our knowledge, NABU now has the largest database on how literacy develops amongst the world’s most vulnerable children, and we are committed to opening up this data to share with external researchers to further best practice and innovation in the field. Internally, NABU currently measures the impact of its work by tracking within-person longitudinal literacy gains across time using a Likert scale, app usage data, reading comprehension scores generated via gamification and demographic variables collected upon sign-up in line with privacy regulations. Our qualitative data collection is limited to user surveys and focus groups which require further development to ensure that project activities are building on NABUs theory of change. In order to measure long-term impact NABU needs a full time M&E expert to work with our newly established research arm to assist in designing and measuring our outcomes. 

Our project model is premised on building strong partnerships for scale in each country to ensure the sustainability of our work in the long run. To achieve this, we develop relationships across all sectors, including government, not for profit, telecommunications, school and local media. Branding and marketing is essential to all business development as well as scaling our solution. 

NABU is working on ways to reach rural areas in Africa and SouthEast Asia that lack internet and school infrastructure. Partnering with large, international telecommunication companies to provide devices would mitigate a huge risk to NABU’s programming and ensure that even the most secluded, low income communities have access to education. Infrastructure companies such as HP, CISCO, Ericsson, Microsoft, Samsung, etc, would scale NABU’s work exponentially.

The COVID-19 pandemic has disproportionately affected the lives of children in developing countries, and disadvantaged children in the US. Even before COVID-19, there was a $148BN annual financing gap to achieve SDG 4. Additional costs due to COVID-19 related school closures risk increasing this financing gap by up to $30BN. Investing now in remedial literacy programs like our NABU Inclusive Literacy Project could help reduce this additional cost by 75%.

We must act now to ensure that all children have equitable access to education and that future generations are not burdened with the long-term impacts of illiteracy; higher school dropout rates, poorer health comes, more sexual exploitation, higher maternal death rates, higher incarceration rates, just to name a few, ultimately leading to widening inequality.

If we win the ASA Prize for Equitable Education, we will use the additional resources to expand our work into the US and serve children from low income households - especially bilingual households who already face more barriers to educational attainment - who do not have the same access to laptops and connectivity that wealthier families have. Using just a smartphone, we can bring families free, fun literacy games and stories, with characters on the pages who look and speak like them. Working with non-profit Social Creatures, we will build “digital safety nets” for low-income families facing social disconnectedness throughout COVID-19 and beyond. We will also work to create a series of books that follow the US curriculum. 

Refugee children have virtually no access to books in a language they speak or understand. Already, their education has been disrupted due to the dangers they face in reaching safety, accessing vital basic resources, acquiring identity documents and helping their families in often vulnerable situations. Compounding this are numerous other obstacles that stop refugee children from resuming their education. Inclusive education is the only durable solution available that also boosts social cohesion and creates diversity in the classroom, a benefit that can extend way beyond schools. However, despite recent efforts to expand educational access to refugee children, primary education remains inaccessible to many.

Literacy as part of education is a fundamental human right. Children are dramatically over-represented among the world’s refugees. This number includes some 13 million child refugees. Where conflict has robbed entire communities of their homes, NABU aims to offer the opportunity to continue an interrupted education, to escape into a story and to find new hope for a brighter future. 

Winning the Andan Prize would allow NABU to provide access to culturally relevant, mother tongue literacy materials to the most vulnerable children in the world. NABU believes in the power of literacy, and responsibly leverages the technology of today’s world to eradicate illiteracy once and for all. When children’s literature is made available in a language that is familiar, a child becomes a more engaged and stronger reader, a faster learner, and is empowered to rise to their full potential.

NABU ensures that our technology is used to empower and encompass the world's most marginalized communities and create a more inclusive digital world. The nabu.org app is affordable and accessible worldwide. The nabu.org app is free and designed for low cost smartphones which are widely accessible. Access to the internet is a key challenge and in places where internet connectivity is sporadic, unreliable or expensive, NABU’s innovative approach is designed for low bandwidth environments and has offline capabilities.

In terms of both digital inclusion and social inclusion, many communities have poor literacy gains due to the lack of access to resources in their own languages. NABU’s reading app provides mother tongue resources and tools not previously available through traditional print channels due to high cost and limited distribution. We ensure that marginalized communities are included and empowered.

If we win the HP Prize for Advancing Digital Equity we aim to implement several functions aimed at children with disabilities making our tool more accessible. We aim to create an audio function, which will allow children with reading disabilities and visual impairment children to become better readers as well as remove the barrier of illiterate caregivers from participating in shared literacy experiences with their children. 

The global literacy crisis disproportionately affects girls in marginalized communities: of the 250 million children who are unable to read, two-thirds are girls. COVID-19 has deepened this urgent crisis. Research demonstrates that illiteracy persists due to lack of access to mother tongue books at early grade levels that help children bridge to reading in English at school. In sub-Saharan Africa, the small, male-dominated publishing industry hinders the development of gender-inclusive books for children. Women creatives must be part of the solution of addressing the book shortage that prevents girls from seeing themselves as the protagonists of their own futures.

In 2016 NABU created the Authentic Book Creation (ABC) Lab to employ local creatives, and publish collections of readers for children who have virtually no access to books. In the last 15 months, our 20 creatives, 55% of whom are women, have published over 155 high quality, levelled children’s books. During lockdown, these books served over 300,000 children and families with free educational resources at home, in print and digital. Our women and girls focused project, Girl Uninterrupted, will expand this work to train and employ 200 female creatives, publishing gender-inclusive collections serving over 500M speakers of the most underserved languages. 

NABU addresses the ways patriarchy, gender inequality and abuse of women’s rights persist by providing women with economic opportunities, but also by ensuring that their creative work forms the foundation of education systems that can break the cycle of the marginalization of women, for good.

Nabu.org’s solution integrates digital technology in the creation and distribution of mother tongue books through the NABU.ORG app, as well as in engagement in reading activities to increase literacy rates. 

Our solution integrates digital technology in the creation of mother tongue children’s books, as we use proprietary AI to level children’s books into 4 levels and 16 sub-levels in any language, to carefully target reading materials to the reader’s skill levels to keep them engaged and motivated to keep learning.

Finally, we use technology to track reading engagement and literacy outcomes. Our system currently measures performance analytics such as time spent reading, number of pages read, books downloaded, book completion rates, and search terms. Winning the GSR Prize will enable us to implement a layer of formative literacy assessment into the NABU reader app, to measure literacy scores over time.

We are also integrating an open science framework data to share learnings from our work, to help inform policy at the highest levels to achieve the SDGs more quickly. The NABU data set unlocked will be one of the largest open data sets of its kind on this hugely under-researched population, helping to drive understanding of how literacy develops among the world’s most vulnerable children.