Library For All's Spark Kits

Children around the world do not have access to the educational resources they need to learn basic literacy and numeracy.

Our solution is a digital 'classroom in a box' – our Spark Kit. Our Elevate app teaches basic literacy and numeracy using gamified learning, while the Library app gives children culturally-relevant books in a language they understand. 

Over 600M children globally aren't learning, and we know that education is their best opportunity to break the cycle of poverty. 

Fully offline and off-grid, Spark Kits can operate anywhere in the world – we know, because our testing has already taken them to the deserts of Ethiopia, the jungles of Papua New Guinea and the islands of the Pacific Ocean. Our innovative design has maximized efficiency, cost and logistics resulting in a relatively cheap intervention. 

Spark Kits put learning in the hands of children anywhere, empowering them to write their own future.

Before the global pandemic, 617M children around the world weren't learning. The World Bank estimates that so far, COVID-19 has pushed a further 72M children into learning poverty. Vulnerable young people without access to the internet, learning resources and support are now facing even greater challenges. 

Without access to resources including culturally relevant, age-appropriate books and learning tools in a language that they understand, these children face a lifetime of illiteracy with consequences including discrimination, inequality and poor health.

Our solution will specifically address the persistent challenges of quality and equity faced by vulnerable students across East Africa, and exacerbated by the global pandemic. 

Prior to COVID-19, both Tanzania and Rwanda were just short of universal primary school attendance. But in both countries a lack of quality resources means the most vulnerable are most likely to miss out on the opportunity of education. 

In Rwanda, students were in overcrowded classrooms – the average student to teacher ratio is 62:1. Policy changes also created a situation where many teachers can't even teach in the official language of instruction – now English. 

In Tanzania 9 in 10 students are in classrooms without any books for students to read.

Each Spark Kit contains 40 Android tablets, with our Accelerate learning platform deployed so all children can access quality learning, stay safe and teachers can monitor their progress. 

ELEVATE APP

A gamified, independent learning app for basic literacy and numeracy. Based on Kitkit School, which has been shown to teach the equivalent of one academic year's learning in just one hour a day. 

Elevate empowers each student to take control of their own learning, regardless of the specific learning barriers they face. This approach also empowers teachers committed to equipping their students, but faced with poor resources, large class sizes, and often mixed-level classes. 

LIBRARY APP 

We publish leveled libraries of culturally relevant, age-appropriate books in mother-tongue languages. 

Behind our library app is our digital-first publishing house. We work with communities through innovative workshops to capture their stories, in their mother-tongue language, then we work with our global creative network to transform these stories into Ministry approved published books aligning with government curriculum where appropriate. We create a tailored curatorial strategy for each library, ensuring a balance of mirrors & windows, fiction & non-fiction, themes, gender representation and inclusion. 

All this comes pre-loaded on our offline and off-grid Spark Kits. 

Our mission is to make knowledge accessible to all, equally.  Library For All's Spark Kit has been designed to reach all children, anywhere. 

Typically, our target populations face a combination of these key barriers to quality education. Crucially, not all contexts face all barriers, and our solution readily adapts to the needs of specific communities.

ACCESS: to basic infrastructure (such as internet, electricity, and transport) or to basic resources (paper, pens, books). 

QUALITY: low funding in teacher training, school infrastructure or learning resources. 

EQUITY: many communities don't have universal barriers to access or quality, but vulnerable or marginalized populations within communities are excluded due to poverty, culture or disability. 

Frequently, books and learning resources do not exist in the languages children speak. 

Our curatorial target for any book collection is 70% mirrors / 30% windows. This ensures opportunities for 'own voice' narratives and cultural representation are encouraged, but also allows readers to explore themes and issues of global relevance.

These barriers have been exacerbated by the global pandemic, adding in new dimensions of digital exclusion and further marginalization as children without access to schooling have fallen even further behind. 

In Rwanda, for example, public school students have missed out on 1.5 academic years. Very few of these students have any resources to support learning at home. Even with schools going back, many students aren't – there are countless reports of children now working to support their families, early pregnancies and families out of work unable to afford the basic cost of education. 

WHY DIGITAL LEARNING TOOLS?

It seems contentious to suggest that digital libraries are a feasible solution for remote and low-income communities for whom basic safety and sanitation are hard to attain. But there are some 3 billion unique smartphone subscriptions globally, with a penetration rate of 55% of the global population, anticipated to be 66% by 2022.

For schools and community centres, a digital library offers benefits in terms of storage and maintenance. Remote classrooms may not have the luxury of the enclosed spaces, controlled temperatures, or cataloguing tools that are optimally deployed to maintain and preserve a paper-based library. Dust, humidity, natural hazards, theft, and the impact of day-to-day handling of shared resources cause loss and damage to printed materials, and these are unlikely to be replaced. Added to this is the complexity of delivering printed materials to remote communities – freight expenses, taxes, transport limitations, environmental impediments – which may result in printed book shipments never reaching their intended recipients. 

A digital library also offers potential for thousands of books to be made available in a school and regularly curated and updated with minimal additional expense or effort on the part of teachers or community leaders.

When it comes to EdTech in the literacy space specifically, there can be resistance to giving early learners access to digital tools for fear of the negative impacts of too much 'screen time'.  Overexposure to screens comes with multiple areas of concern and ongoing research, including the impacts of light-emitting tools on sleep behaviours, and reduced oral language development. But much of this research, and resultant commentary, concerns educational screen usage as part of an already high overall daily screen time calculation. The Australian Department of Health, for example, recommends no more than 2 hours of 'sedentary recreational screen time' per day excluding screen time needed for schoolwork. But for many of Library For All's target communities, where television viewing and internet usage have limited availability in the home, overall daily screen time is minimal, so an online or app-based intervention will not amplify screen time to problematic levels.

The devastating lack of education resources for too many young learners was the driving force behind the innovative design that is now Library For All's Spark Kit. Too many children lack equitable access to culturally relevant and age-appropriate learning resources in their mother-tongue language. 

Our Spark Kit comes pre-loaded with collections of relevant books and learning resources written for children in their culture and their language. All packaged together in our 'classroom in a box' - our Spark Kit. Providing children with safe access to an entirely offline, off-grid quality learning environment ensuring equal access for young learners anywhere. 

After 10 years refining our solution, Library For All is now poised for growth and at scale. We have active projects in the Pacific and Southeast Asia of various scales and complexities. To date, we've reached over 410,000 children – but with ambitions to benefit 20 million children by 2030 this is only the beginning. 

Our project is tested in these environments and now ready to trial in East Africa and other contexts where need and population density will mean we deploy at an increasingly larger scale. 

We uniquely bring together a publishing house, technology experts, and development practitioners to deliver interventions that disrupt traditional activities in each of these sectors. And because our team members are experts in their field, we deliver to the highest standards, at scale, and delivered in an innovative yet simple ‘classroom in a box’ called Spark.

Library For All’s Spark Kit was developed following years of field testing, research, and peer reviews. It takes multiple resources, including software, hardware, EdTech, and storage - all previously only available through multiple different vendors, and bundles them into one simple portable kit ready to be deployed to children anywhere. 

Each Spark Kit contains a custom-built learning environment culturally tailored and includes:

Hardware: 40 Android tablets in rugged custom covers housed, charged, and networked in one location. 

Software: Library For All’s Accelerate learning platform including our Library app, Elevate, and dashboards, all in an offline childsafe environment.

Resources: we, working with communities, make culturally relevant and age-appropriate books for children in their mother-tongue language, available digitally on our Library app

Storage; all housed in a rugged military-style case with custom packing foam design to withstand the elements of rugged environments

By innovatively combining all this, we provide an end-to-end solution in a holistic learning environment offering access to safe, equitable quality education for children anywhere.  

Current direct beneficiaries: 412,000 children

In one year (cumulative): 1M children

In five years (cumulative): 5M children

Our Monitoring, Evaluation & Learning framework measures if outcomes are contributing to children who can learn, do learn and enjoy learning.  

We track progress with:

# of children reached

# books created

# program countries 

At its core, we achieve outcomes by building relationships to influence behavior change. We measure these relationships and changes to assess impact:

TEACHERS

Improve access to appropriate learning materials and supports students read and enjoy reading.

Qualitative: focus groups explore impacts on teaching, comfort with technology tools, and interest in supporting readers, as well as discussing what worked well/what didn't.

Quantitative: baseline and end-line surveys using Likert scale determine how often teacher promoted reading in class and at home, satisfaction with training, skills/knowledge developed and degree of comfort encouraging students to read.

STUDENTS

Students increase literacy levels within their country context

Students increase their amount of time reading and report an increase in enjoyment

Measurement

Qualitative: Most Significant Change interviews collect stories to show increased time and enjoyment reading, and how that is impacting their life and school.

Quantitative: baseline through end-line surveys using Likert scale to measure time spent reading and level of enjoyment reading. Tablet dashboard data tracks change and assesses student reading levels. 

FAMILIES

Increase their amount of time reading and report an increase in enjoyment.

Qualitative: Most Significant Change interviews collect stories of increased reading by family members.

Quantitative: use average household size (4.0 Rwanda/4.6 Tanzania) for indirect beneficiaries, assuming benefit to whole household. 

20 full-time

4 part-time

5 other works (engaged as staff of partner organizations delivering LFA projects in-country)

We are a global team of authors, illustrators, designers, curators, developers, and entrepreneurs, with a passion for improving the lives of children through technology-enabled learning tools.

Library For All Founder and CEO, Rebecca McDonald was moved by images of suffering after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, relocating to volunteer on community projects. What affected Rebecca most in Haiti was seeing classrooms with hundreds of children that had no books. As a keen reader of e-books herself, the idea for an accessible, culturally relevant digital library came to Rebecca. As a result, Library For All was founded, giving children around the world access to books and knowledge. 

Rebecca is supported by a team of passionate and professional changemakers, experts across technology, publishing, program development, and business development. Library for All boasts a team of in-house publishing and content experts, including a Specialist Librarian, who draw on years of experience to ensure high-quality appropriate children's books. Our innovative technology is led by our CTO with over 20 years of experience in driving new technology and leads a team of specialists across app development and product management.

Whilst many of the team draw from experiences working in communities across the globe, including the Pacific, Southeast Asia, and Africa, our in-country work is delivered by local program staff. This ensures our success by providing a deep cultural understanding and firsthand feedback of program implementations across the communities in which we work.

We believe representation and diversity matter. In 2019 it was reported that there were approximately five times the number of male CEOs across Australia. The gap is even higher in tech – but this hasn't stopped our founder and CEO, Rebecca McDonald. She works tirelessly to improve educational outcomes and has built an impressive senior leadership team that's 60% female.  

Our leadership team continuously advocates making knowledge accessible to all, equally, committed to providing learning resources that are culturally diverse and inclusive. Our curatorial strategy includes positively addressing gender equity issues, purposefully redressing the gender imbalance in character-driven storytelling with <50% of our narratives having a female lead role. Disability representation and inclusion is also positively discussed, including explicitly discussing the lived experiences of people with different abilities to enhance support and understanding. Books in our collections reflect our commitment to addressing sustainability and environmental stewardship, opening discussions around key issues including recycling and natural disasters. 

Delivering programs across 9 countries, Library for All is committed to the inclusivity of "own voice" narrative and cultural representation. We thrive on the knowledge and expertise of those in the community. To this, our team is proud to work with our diverse creatives community of 402 authors and 229 illustrators across 28 countries. We also have in-country staff as part of our Program Services team and are delighted to have Dr. Julie Owen, a proud Aboriginal woman from the Nurrunga/Ngarrindjeri Nations leading our work in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities.

AWARENESS: we know that Spark works. It’s tried, tested and producing quality educational outcomes in nine countries. So we are applying to Solve to scale, expand our reach and ultimately provide access to a quality, safe and equitable learning environment for children who deserve it. 

FUNDING: to deliver more Spark Kits to children that needed them, we need funding. We know that our end users can’t afford our product – it’s cheap and effective but remains out of reach for the children we designed it for. Therefore, we need to seek funding from other sources. By securing funding to create content and software that will persist, we reduce the cost to education providers who need only invest in hardware - but we require the initial funding to launch in new geographies.

BUSINESS MODEL

As a young organization ready to scale we are eager to learn from those who have gone before us and benefit from their experience. A key consideration at this stage is the strategic direction of how we scale, and which opportunities to pursue and act on as they become available. Related to this is managing our human resources for the long-term, so managing working within the capacity of our team but continuing to grow without over-committing.

MONITORING & EVALUATION

Our digital solution means we can gather extensive data on the usage of our education tools. As we scale, we hope to use this data to build an evidence base for our work and assess contributions towards global impact. Complexities here include integrating with national and international education standards and measurement tools. 

PRODUCT/SERVICE DISTRIBUTION

Challenges in this space have included shipping costs and delays due to the global pandemic and in general the feasibility of shipping relatively small amounts of materials to remote locations. 

SOLUTION PARTNERS

MIT experts in EdTech, especially faculty from the Abdul Latif Jameel World Education Lab

Girls-4-Girls (Kytabu) – We would like to partner with their solution and provide our Spark Kits to host their virtual classroom for Kenyan girls that also serves as a digital platform for peer-to-peer mentorship and collaboration.

Yiya AirScience – partner together to provide access to devices and learning experiences in Uganda

IMPLEMENTING PARTNERS

For implementation in East Africa we hope to work with the following organizations initially, who are very eager to introduce Spark Kits to their beneficiary communities:

Save the Children Rwanda

Save the Children Tanzania

Edmond Rice Foundation

We will also build relationships with the relevant national Ministries of Education in these countries.

CONTENT PARTNERS

As we grow our library collections to more languages and geographies we seek to partner with nascent publishing industries to foster the growth of local publishing sectors, in turn promoting the work of local creatives including authors and illustrators.

Our Spark Kits hold the potential to facilitate education continuity for young people impacted by displacement. The Kits are easily transported, stored and set up – and require no infrastructure to operate (electricity, internet, desks, etc) – meaning children can be learning instantly. Being a digital solution affords the flexibility to load content in different languages, and our independent learning app supports educators in emergency contexts where students come from diverse school backgrounds. 

Spark Kits open up the opportunities of education to all children, anywhere. For children in remote locations, from communities living in poverty or who speak a minority language a lack of even basic education means they cannot go on to pursue futures in STEM. This is a missed opportunity for our world, but by empowering these young people with literacy and numeracy they are equipped to take control of their futures and pursue further study

Our content actively promotes gender equity through representation and engagement. Digital tools help girls to achieve basic education, and our freely available app means they can learn at home too.

Don't qualify

A lack of access to basic education materials in a language children understand is the most fundamental of challenges to education. We know that education offers the best opportunity to break the cycle of poverty, and in turn, contribute to a sustainable and more equitable world. Spark Kits are a surprisingly simple solution that draws on decades of tech development to now hold the power of reaching millions of children.