Aga Khan Foundation

The Aga Khan Foundation (AKF), an agency of the Aga Khan Development Network (AKDN) established in 1967 by His Highness the Aga Khan, is a private, not-for-profit international development agency that seeks to provide long-term solutions to society’s problems. AKF brings together human, financial, and technical resources to address challenges faced by the poorest and most marginalised communities in the world. AKF has a special focus on investing in human potential, expanding opportunity, and improving the overall quality of life, especially for women and girls. AKF’s primary areas of focus are; Education; Early Childhood Development (ECD); Health and Nutrition; Civil Society; Agriculture and Food Security; and Economic Inclusion.

The work of AKF is grounded in a set of universal ethics. All AKDN agencies have the goal of creating sustainable livelihoods and building institutions that improve the quality of life for communities and individuals. Our core values are:

• Respect for human dignity

• Compassion and solidarity

• Self-reliancePluralism: tolerance, openness, and understanding toward other peoples’ cultures, values and faiths

• The right to participate and determine local priorities

• Service to humanity through volunteerism

AKF was established in Kenya in 1974 as a permanent institution dedicated to long-term investment across all six AKF focus sectors to improve the quality of life for marginalised communities across Kenya. Currently, AKF operates in the Coast Region and Rift Valley Region as well as reaching communities beyond these geographies as technical advisors on national consortia projects.

AKF’s education goal is to ensure girls and boys, women and men, are equipped with the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and values to help them interact effectively with the world and be contributing members of a pluralistic society. In Kenya, AKF benefits from a global community of education specialists, academics, and practitioners all dedicated to improving education opportunities and learning of boys and girls, women and men. Through a human centred, collaborative approach to developing, testing, and iterating innovations, AKF has been able to drive evidence-based, cost-effective, scalable solutions that improve access to and quality of education services for all boys and girls. By also assuming a systems approach, AKF has enabled these solutions to complement and add value to the complex fabric of the Kenyan education ecosystem. As a result, over the past 45 years, AKF has developed strong networks and become a valued education partner to government, development partners, civil society, private sector, academia, schools, teachers, and communities alike. Since 2000, AKF has partnered with over 1,500 public schools and impacted more than 1,000,000 children in Kenya.

Rupert is a member of AKF East Africa’s Senior Leadership Team as the Regional Education and ECD Advisor. In this position, Rupert provides strategic and programme design leadership across the region, a role that has enabled him to develop a deeper understanding and appreciation for differing design methodologies to ensure effective programme design, inspiring new thinking and innovation, and to accelerate proven concepts toward scale. In addition, Rupert is the technical lead across the education and ECD portfolios, a position that enables him to recognise and identify where there are opportunities across the portfolio to integrate, amplify, and scale. Allied to the role of leading business development, this links to identifying and realising funds to further the strategic priorities and high-impact solutions across the region.

AKF implements an annual design challenge (this year on climate) where selected teams are expected to contribute 4 hours per week to continue investing in the design process. This has set a precedence and will apply to the Team Leader and the entire team under the LEAP Project. 

We have embraced the idea of having a diverse, empowered team, working through this iterative process to maximise success. The team includes:

• Team Leader - Education, learning, and social development specialist able to root the design in evidence of learning, behaviour change, and other technical aspects of the solution. The team leader ensures the team has the ability to make decisions and implement these with respect to the Maktaba and as it relates to the education portfolio

• Delivery specialist - Deep understanding of context and immersed in the process of how librarians and communities have made Maktaba work, the challenges and the successes

• Data and Learning specialist - Led on the design of the learning and research frameworks and ensuring data informed decision-making

• Design specialist - Will act to ensure that the team understands and maximises the opportunity of this experience from a design perspective and support to lead on the design strategy internally, more broadly speaking. 

• Graphic Design specialist (external) - Engaged since the start of the prototyping phase produced high quality products for the starter kit and other support materials

• Finance specialist - Leads on finalising the costed model for delivery based on actuals and expected expenses to inform the longer-term business case for investors.

  We have a strong team that is keen to take up this challenge and grow as individuals and as an organization. 

Maktaba is a network of re-imagined community libraries accelerating access to locally created content, igniting children’s love of reading.

In Kenya, children are expected and pushed to read for purely academic purposes, rather than reading for enjoyment. This academic focus is understandable where reading is largely restricted to the school compound, disconnected from the rich storytelling culture and heritage prevalent across Kenya. Global evidence demonstrates that children who enjoy reading have higher social, emotional, and learning outcomes. 

Reading for Children, a community library in a box developed in 2011, was an initiative designed to increase access to children’s books in underserved rural communities, a reality across Kenya where there are only 64 government funded public libraries across only 33 of the 47 counties. Through this, AKF demonstrated parental and child interest and demand and the impact that libraries and storybooks have on parent and child relationships.

“This has helped my sons and daughters to be ardent readers. They love books.” - Asha (parent and librarian), 2017.

“Our ‘Drop Everything and Read’ time remains his most favourite time.” - Mariam (parent), 2017. 

However, this initiative also demonstrated the significant challenges for the sustainability of community libraries. Once the community libraries are established, children quickly read the stories they enjoy, but with no new content, they can become quickly disengaged. While there are good quality Kenyan storybooks (AKF conducted an audit in 2022 for the Maktaba pilot and has a comprehensive list of recommended, age-appropriate titles) the number and selection is relatively small and prohibitively expensive for libraries to regularly buy. In addition, when they are bought the print quality is low so these books rapidly degrade in the hands of young children and their parents. These issues are further exacerbated in remote geographies and rural areas where the means and costs of distribution further increase the barrier to accessing new content. With the limited ability of communities to meet these direct and indirect costs of new story books, interest in the library by children and parents drops.

Some schools and communities with international links do access donated books from various parts of the world. While well meaning and enabling children to access diverse ways of knowing, this can undermine the ability of communities to generate reserves of cultural capital. The opportunity for children to acquire their own culture can be eroded (Leguina et al., 2021). Unable to access context relevant stories and story books, published in local languages, and featuring local stories and characters that allow children to see themselves represented, children rapidly become disenfranchised, further embedding the notion in their minds that reading is a purely academic endeavour. 

As such, Maktaba was born from a desire to answer the question; How Might We enable children and communities across Kenya to access high quality, culturally relevant, and locally sourced stories and story books to instil a love of reading for joy.

Maktaba is a network of re-imagined community libraries accelerating access to locally created content, igniting children’s love of reading in Kenya. At the prototyping stage, AKF worked with five communities in Nairobi to understand the usability and value proposition of the Yoto Player, a user-friendly audio device designed to be used by people with low ICT exposure. Feedback was unanimously positive:

“Yes I would (buy a Yoto). It is a nice product for your child. I would recommend to other parents." - Rebecca, parent, 2021

Having validated the player, AKF integrated the Yoto Player into the community library concept for the Maktaba pilot with 100 communities in Kenya (and a further 280 across Tanzania and Uganda to design and test the Maktaba solution:

• The Maktaba Starter Kit - Based on learning, AKF adapted the Yoto Player user guide, an idea that grew to become a full ‘Maktaba Starter Kit’ designed to be an intuitive box of materials, resources, and guides to set a librarian up for success. The Kit includes, but is not limited to:

  • Welcome guide - Includes sections on how to set-up a fun and engaging library space and some simple ideas on playful activities to further engage children in the stories and books.

  • Revised Yoto Player user guide

  • Games and activity booklet and posters

  • Selection of age-appropriate, locally sourced books - Sourced from existing titles from Kenyan authors and vetted by childrens’ book specialists. AKF also invested in the Kenyan creative sector to develop a new line of storybooks, Jabali and Sauti, as part of a broader ‘universe’ of content available through audio and visual channels.

• The Yoto Player - Stories are stored on the player and can be listened to and navigated by inserting a story card. As an online/offline solution AKF provides the cards in the starter kit and can then add content centrally which can be updated across all libraries when connected to the internet and then played offline. AKF crowd sourced local stories from local providers, including Ubongo Kids and KaBrezan, while others have created new content to leverage this distribution channel, e.g. Cheza Cheza designed a dance card. Jabali and Sauti audio content was also created. The Yoto Player also enables communities to ‘Create their Own’ which has been used to capture their own stories to build the community's cultural capital.

• Maktaba Podcast - AKF collaborated with award winning podcast developers to develop a monthly podcast, designed to enable librarians to access new information, great ideas from across the Maktaba network, and develop a sense of community. Distributed through the Yoto Player, this acts as a cost effective, accessible means to support, celebrate, and network librarians.

Maktaba, therefore, re-imagines the purpose of a library, from the normative image of a quiet space for study toward a fun community space of collaboration and joy, that meets diverse cognitive needs and learning variability while providing a continuous supply of locally created content directly into the hands of children, parents, and communities.

Through Maktaba’s pilot, AKF has been testing assumptions around the desirability, feasibility, and impact of the solution, in particular, whether we are creating value for parents, children and librarians as it relates to previously articulated challenges around access, distribution, and networking of locally created and distributed content.

Engaging with existing content: “Our library has been an inspiration to our community. The number of children coming in has been growing and growing over the months, making our read aloud sessions more popular in the community (desirability-children)… the space has attracted more donors who are bringing more books to the space (desirability- community).” - Geofery, Co-founder, Pwani Youth Network

Generating new content: “The Yoto player has been a great experience for my community... The player is a valuable item in our library, and we are excited to be recording our own cultural stories (desirability- community)’ - Brian Ochieng, Librarian

Distribution: “Hosting a home library has offered a learning space to a lot of children in my community…With the Yoto player, children get to listen to learning audios and even have favourite songs (desirability- librarian)” - Hawaa Rajab, Librarian

Networking: It has built a bond with my community… Parents from my community have been so supportive and would bring the children themselves to my home (desirability-librarian.” - Hawaa Rajab, Librarian

AKF will be developing deeper learning on desirability through both quantitative (e.g. library visit numbers, Yoto content listening figures, podcast surveys, etc.) and qualitative (e.g. story testing, interviews, and community walks) in partnership with Samuel Hall and 60 Decibels. Through this, AKF will also generate learning on the feasibility around the user-friendly nature of the starter-kit and Yoto Player, for example, to enable Maktaba to be established without any training requirements. This more robust learning will be fully analysed and shared by early October.

Through this AKF and 60 Decibels are also building a learning infrastructure that is being designed for scale   rooted in low-tech-based remote data collection approaches, tools, and channels (e.g. SMS, USSD, etc) and through the Yoto Player. This infrastructure can not only be leveraged during the LEAP challenge, but will also enable AKF to continually collect and assess user feedback to respond to need, evolving tastes, and trends.

The investment of content developers and other organisations in creating new content, Cheza Cheza Dance, or facilitating their existing content, including LAM Sisterhood (an award-winning production house) and Ubongo (an award winning children’s content developer), on the Yoto Player has started to validate the potential market desirability of Maktaba to creators and other providers wanting to access a network of libraries and their users with content.  

Maktaba is informed by previous research and studies conducted by AKF in Kenya. These studies and their impact on our work are detailed below. 

Through AKF’s Reading for Children project in 2013, 950 community libraries were established in 500 communities with community librarians trained to support parents to read with their children. This enabled AKF to; i) demonstrate the importance of contextually relevant books for engaging children; ii) parents need concrete ways to develop the confidence to support their children’s reading, and; iii) understand the importance of new content to maintain child and parent interest. From this, AKF ensured that all content was locally sourced, vetted, and provided in local languages (and now has these titles catalogued), ensured locally created games and activities linked to learning to support parents and children to have fun while reading, and there was an explicit focus on distribution; the Yoto Player.

In 2021, AKF ran a prototype, Yoto for Watoto (Yoto for Children) in five communities in Nairobi. Through this initial prototype AKF was able to demonstrate desirability (these Yoto Players that are still in use today), but noted that the User Guide was not relevant or supportive enough, particularly around pairing to a phone. As a result, AKF ran a two day workshop with librarians to re-write and design the User Guide for Kenya. This has been tested through the pilot and well received by the librarians with minimal issues. Small iterations have been made.

During COVID induced school closures, AKF co-designed gamified learning experiences with parents, teachers, and children and produced PlayKits and Posters. Through a rapid assessment of the user experience and desirability, we developed significant learning on the relevance and usability of the designs, learning that has significant;y influenced the designs for the Maktaba starter kit. These designs have been further iterated based on user feedback from the pilot. In addition, we learnt how WhatsApp was a platform of choice for teachers and parents and so all play activities and posters have been produced in small file size images for sharing on WhatsApp (and other social media) with low data cost implications. 

Collectively, this research demonstrates a demand for community libraries, especially where provided resources are enjoyable, contextually relevant, and allow for children and librarians to continually access new materials.

Through our Maktaba pilot and previous research AKF has demonstrated the demand and desirability of community spaces where children and parents can access locally developed stories, books, games, etc. Evidence to date shows how Maktaba, including the Yoto Players, Posters, Games, books, and content, is a desirable solution for children, parents, librarians, and communities alike.. We will further substantiate this through the current research due in October. 

Moving forward we are interested in developing a deeper understanding of feasibility and viability of Maktaba to become a scalable solution with a vision of 5,000 Maktaba across Kenya by 2028 (if not sooner!!!). To achieve this we would like to test our assumptions around and understand how we can design better for:

• Community and Librarian set-up experience - This would include generating evidence from the moment a community finds out about the opportunity to apply for a Maktaba Starter Kit to receiving and setting up the library space. How do communities become aware of this opportunity? How do they apply? What is the usability of the intuitive starter kit? Are there any remaining challenges setting up the Yoto Player? Etc.

• Librarian support, networking, and the Maktaba Community - At scale, it is not feasible to provide initial training or in-person support. While the starer-kit addresses the first, how does a librarian access support is another question. Currently we are learning about the desirability and how useful the podcast is. Beyond this, how might we broaden and deepen librarian networks through ICT enabled solutions and existing platforms, for example, WhatsApp? What is the role of experienced librarians supporting new? How could there be ‘super librarians’? How might AKF leverage its network of over 800 CSO to support and network? How do ensure librarians feel part of a community of librarians, i.e. I am part of something bigger, the Maktaba movement?

• Packaging Maktaba for investment - Maktaba has already demonstrated its potential value to children’s content providers with partners happy to contribute. How could the ‘network’ provide value to the ‘network’? Beyond this, while initial thinking would put the cost per Maktaba (inclusive of the Starter Kit and a refresh pack after six-months) at approximately $500 direct costs (not including overheads) what is the true cost of doing business? How could e ‘package’ Maktaba for investment to different partners? Domestic philanthropy (investing approximately $1.5 billion per year according to an upcoming report by Impact Philanthropy Africa), Private sector, international philanthropy, donors, etc. to generate a sustainable revenue model to finance the vision?

By addressing these above core areas and questions, AKF will test the assumptions and generate the evidence around the feasibility and viability of Maktaba to be a scalable solution delivering social value in the long-term.

• Feasibility: How might we increase the intuitive nature of the Maktaba starter kit for librarians and other community members to increase demand and access? 

• Feasibility: How might we increase Maktaba connections and networks within communities and across the network of libraries? 

• Viability: How might we package and/or promote Maktaba for investment (business case)?

Based on the above, the main potential outputs we propose include:

• Guidance and recommendations on how communities, library sites, etc. would find out about and apply for a Maktaba library. In this, guidance on how this will enable communities, parents, and potential library sites and librarians to instantly identify the value proposition to them as people and as a community.

• Recommendations for how the starter kit could be made more intuitive and user friendly to enable librarians to establish and set-up an inviting and playful library, hassle free.

• Recommendations and guidance on what ICT platforms can be leveraged to provide librarians with ongoing support and to connect them to a network of librarians and a Maktaba community.

• If in-peron support can be provided by a network of decentralised ‘librarian experts’ or ‘leaders’, what would this look like and what type of support would provide the greatest benefit to libraries and librarians. 

• Clearly defined value propositions for different investment groups and how might we package the Maktaba to diverse investment partners 

• Recommendations on how to maximise the data collection infrastructure to learn more to improve user experience, impact, and continue to scale 

Maktaba is a priority for AKF’s education portfolio having seen the transformative impact it has had on the lives of children, their parents, and the communities where they live. The evidence linking reading to broader academic and non-academic development is clear and so AKF is committed to integrating and growing the Maktaba network of libraries through our current portfolio and new proposals, as well as, seeking financing through more non-traditional partners, e.g. private sector.

Initially, AKF would prioritise which outputs to action and secure the resources to do this through our current portfolio. Being an agency of AKDN, we would also seek to product test our value propositions to our private sector sister agencies to hone our pitch in front of a friendly audience, while leveraging financing from these private sector partners. We will also prioritise action around these outputs based on their connection to the desirability, feasibility, and viability of the solution, whereby issues related to desirability will be tackled first, before addressing learnings from a feasibility perspective. 

These outputs will not be completely divorced from the ways in which we test assumptions, approach, and set-up other high potential interventions for scale. The outputs, therefore, will have transferable value into the broader education portfolio in East Africa and globally, as well as, AKF’s other sectors.

AKF is a leader in social innovation and design thinking in Kenya, East Africa, and globally. The design expert is at the apex of how these design processes are developed, delivered, and adapted based on learning and experience across East Africa. Through this process, this design expert will be exposed to a different way of approaching design from a global leader in design and design thinking. This experience will, therefore, inform and influence the way AKF delivers design processes internally and across AKF’s programming to improve the quality of these and how they better serve the communities with which we partner. As such, this process will enable AKF to improve how we deliver our public goods and enable the partners we work with, develop new public goods.

From the perspective of Maktaba, the outputs will be triaged and immediately actioned through existing investments, as mentioned above. At the outcome level, it is fully expected that AKF will be able to build out a more robust business model that leverages different revenue partners to mobilise the resources to achieve the ambitious vision for Maktaba of 5,000 libraries in five years. In addition, with a growing distribution network, AKF would also seek to further invest in the Kenyan creative sector to develop context relevant stories and content for distribution through the network.

Finally, as noted above, AKF has also piloted Maktaba in Zanzibar, mainland Tanzania, and Uganda. As we learn and succeed in Kenya, the principles will be adapted to these contexts to achieve the east African vision of 15,000 Maktabas across the region in the next five years.