Book Dash - affordable children's books for all
South Africa has very low literacy levels, which contribute to growing inequality and a stagnating economy. A key factor is the low level of book ownership (58% of households do not own a single leisure book). Sharing books with young children is a proven, effective way to stimulate their cognitive and literacy development, but this is not possible if there are no books to read.
Book Dash removed the cost barrier by innovating the publishing process and removing most traditional costs associated with publishing. We publish new, high-quality, African storybooks at 20% of traditional publishing costs.
If we print at scale each book can cost as little as 70 US cents or less. To grow and achieve optimal impact we want to distribute our books into the Health sector, thereby enabling families to start building home libraries at the birth of a new baby.
There are roughly 1 million children born in South Africa each year. The human potential this represents is often not realised: 78% of the fourth graders tested in the PIRLS study (an international reading benchmark study) cannot read for meaning in any language.
The low literacy levels cannot be effectively addressed by a school-based solution: it's too little, too late. It is increasingly acknowledged that the earlier an ECD intervention takes place, the greater the return on investment in terms of individual and societal impact.
The experience of reading between caregiver and child has reliably been shown to increase bonding and responsive caregiving, provide holistic early learning opportunities and deepen a sense of safety and security. This means that a simple and inexpensive book addresses three of the five pillars identified by UNICEF and WHO in the recent Nurturing Care Framework.
The particular problem we are solving is getting masses of books to South African families - specifically the families with new babies - to start cultivating reading as a family activity at birth and through-out the pre-school years. This will contribute to the decrease of the shocking figure of 78% non-readers.
Book Dash is very clear on our role in the literacy value chain: we do not work directly with families or children, but we provide the essential components (affordable books of a high quality) that ECD and literacy organisations use in their work. We have strong partnerships with NGO's like Wordworks and Nal'ibali that train caregivers on the advantages of reading with their children, on how to read with their children, on reading for pleasure, etc.
In working together to improve literacy, we advocate the importance of book ownership with our partners, and we are gratified to see that these organisations are increasingly including take-home books as part of their programmes.
In addition to our existing partnerships with ECD and Literacy organisations we are establishing relationships with organisations that work at the nexus of health and literacy in order to get our books to families through the healthcare system. An example is a pilot project between Ilifa Labantwana and Nal'ibali in 5 Ideal Clinics, where healthcare workers are trained to talk to mothers about the advantages of reading at the different milestone visits, and hand over packs of books for the family to take home and keep.
Book Dash is built on process innovations within the publishing industry to optimise production efficiency and radically reduce costs.
There are several layers of process innovations culminating in an 80% reduction of the cost of books:
1) We use technology to achieve scale: our custom design templates and book plans enable our creative teams to work productively and creatively within strict parameters, thereby creating and completing an entire new children's book in 12 hours.
2) Professional Volunteering and Collaboration: we invite professionals working in the creative industry to give their time and skill to Book Dash at a 12-hour bookmaking event. The writers, designers and illustrators collaborating in bookmaking teams in these events find it very fulfilling and many people apply to participate in all events we run.
3) Open license: The books created in this way are open-sourced and governed by a Creative Commons license. There are no restrictions on the books created: anyone can download our source files from our website, translate our books, print our books, even sell our books - as long as the creative team and Book Dash are credited. The open license allows our stories to reach corners of the world where we would never have been able to get to. Just one example is that Google’s reading app Rivet uses our books, and at least 50 websites with free reading resources re-use our books.
4) We have innovated the print format and extent (number of pages) of our books for optimal print efficiency, while still retaining the elegant design of a good children's book.
5) We achieve massive efficiency in production through a process innovation around pooled procurement. In order to achieve our vision of flooding the country with books for all families from the time of the birth of their children, we need to print large volumes of our books to lower the unit cost as far as possible (US 70 cents or less). We do this through Collaborative Print Runs: from time to time we select about 20 titles from the Book Dash library in various South African languages and we invite all the organisations we work with to place orders for these titles. All the small orders combined give us the large volumes required. Organisations can thus order as few as 100 copies of a title, and still get the benefit of the low unit cost because of the pooled procurement.
- Enable parents and caregivers to support their children’s overall development
- Prepare children for primary school through exploration and early literacy skills
- Growth
- New business model or process
Books in South Africa are very expensive, and this contributes to the low levels of literacy that we experience.
Book Dash uses technology and process innovations to reduce the costs related to book publishing with 80%. The only cost that remains is printing.
This enables us to print and distribute books at approximately 70 US cents per copy to children who live in poverty.
This flood of books is a cost-effective, low-cost high-impact way to address the literacy crisis in the country.
The Global Book Alliance in 2019, on Twitter: "Groups likeBook Dash are changing the shape of global book markets with open access, high quality books to download, print and share."
1) We use social networks:
- to spread the word about what we do, and how we do it, and thereby enthuse people to support us.
- to recruit the best creative professionals to participate in our content-creation events.
- to advertise our pooled procurement events to all our partner organisations.
2) We use technology to achieve scale: our custom design templates and book plans enable our creative teams to work productively and creatively within strict parameters, thereby creating and completing an entire new children's book in 12 hours.
3) The technology of open-sourcing allows for a limitless digital footprint: the books created by Book Dash are governed by a Creative Commons license which enables a global impact - so much bigger than a 3-person office in Cape Town, South Africa!
4) Our process innovation coupled with our principle of open-sourcing everything we do has enabled groups in other countries to replicate Book Dash events (e.g. in Angola, Nigeria, Cambodia, France).
5) We achieve massive efficiency in production through a process innovation around pooled procurement, thereby regularly offering books to our partners at 70 US cents a copy.
- Social Networks
Our starting point is reputable international research, for instance the finding that the presence of books in the home has a greater influence on a child’s educational attainment than parents’ income or level of education. (Evans, 2010).
Not nearly enough children own books in South Africa. This contributes to the literacy crisis in the country (78% of our fourth grade children cannot read for meaning). One of the barriers to book ownership is the high cost of books.
Book Dash addresses the cost barrier through our various process innovations, printing large volumes of our books at 70 US cents, and distributing them to children across the country to own through our partners.
Our partner organisations report on book distribution and response, and report to us on usage and impact.
- Children and Adolescents
- Infants
- Rural Residents
- Peri-Urban Residents
- Urban Residents
- Very Poor/Poor
- Low-Income
- Minorities/Previously Excluded Populations
- South Africa
- South Africa
In 2019 we will print and distribute 225,5100 books. Generally each child receives 5 books through our partner organisations, which means that we have served 45,100 children so far this year.
By the end of 2020 we will have printed and distributed 1 million books in total, with 300,000 books in 2020, translating into 60,000 children each receiving 5 of our books.
By the end of 2024 we will print and distribute 500,000 books per year, serving 100,000 children per year or a total of 500,000 children over 5 years.
The research about book ownership for children living in poverty speaks for itself:
"Having as few as 20 books in the home has a significant impact on propelling a child to a higher level of education, and the more books you add, the greater the benefit." Evans, 2010
"Children who have a book of their own are 15 times more likely to read above the level expected for their age, than those who don’t." National Literacy Trust, UK, 2017.
By 2024 we will have printed and distributed a total of 3 million books since 2015. This serves 600,000 children each receiving and owning 5 of our books, thereby opening up the opportunity for these children to read above their age level.
In addition, millions of children around the world would have read our stories in a digital format (on our App, on our website, on one of the many reading websites that uses our stories), or have engaged with our stories in an adapted format: animation, audio book, etc. And more organisations would have replicated our model to host book-creation events in their own communities.
More funding to print more books: the more money we get in, the more books we print!
Distribution is a significant cost factor when we want to distribute our books to ECD centres in rural or far-flung areas.
Funding: deepen our relationships with current funders, and cultivate relationships with new funders. Our existing funders are very loyal to Book Dash, and have a great appreciation of what we do:
“Visits to partners who received the Book Dash books last year are showing real evidence of progress as they deepen their literacy work and, of course, youngsters’ `ownership of books’. In fact it’s the latter aspect which the partners express greatest delight about and they believe – as do we all – that this may be the real clincher in getting kids hooked on books early on.”
Cecily Salmon, The Solon Foundation, January 2019
Distribution: we are exploring alternative distribution options, e.g. to get a portion of our distribution as an in-kind donation from courier companies, or piggy-backing on existing distribution networks for other types of product (e.g. credit cards).
- Nonprofit
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There are only three people working full-time at Book Dash: 2 Programme Directors and 1 intern. We punch way about our size: in the 4 years of our existence, we have printed and distributed more than 650,000 books to impoversihed children in South Africa.
The three founders of Book Dash serve as our Board of Directors.
Book Dash is a social impact publishing organisation, and the team's skills, background and experience reflect the different aspects required to flood the country with high-quality, affordable children's books using innovative systems:
The Board of Directors are all professionals in publishing, digital innovation and social impact.
The operational management (the two programme directors) have a combined scorecard of 25 years' experience in traditional and digital publishing, education and social impact organisations.
Book Dash is primarily a publisher of children’s books. We are very clear on our role in the literacy value chain: we do not work directly with children or families, but we rely on partner organisations to distribute the books and support implementation.
These partner organisations work in literacy, or support ECD centres, or train parents. We work with hundreds of organisations (please see the map at this link for visual representation of the distribution of our partner organisations). Examples of our partners are Nal'ibali, Wordworks and the Mikhulu Trust.
We actively source funding to print and distribute our books for free to children who do not own any books. We write funding proposals to private trusts, to companies who have corporate/social investment budgets, and foundations.
Through their grants, some of our funding partners fund operations, and others fund printing, while other partners fund a combination of operations and printing.
In addition, we charge a 25% management fee on all printing we do. This supports our operational costs.
We sell some books to the general public, and our margin on these sales is much higher than on the funded print runs. This supports our operational costs.
We have several multi-year grants, and we consistently apply for one-year grants as well.
We fund a large part of our operational budget through the management fee we charge for all pruinting. When we print more books (even at a lower cost), our income from printing grows.
Our management structure is very lean, with two skilled full-time resources allocated to manage all aspects of the organisation, and the Board weighing in on strategic decisions.
Funding: connecting Book Dash with grant-making organisations that are interested in our model, and in helping to improve literacy levels in South Africa.
Distribution: connecting Book Dash with other organisations that have explored and adopted interesting, alternative distribution models.
App development: our app is very popular (100k+ downloads), but it was created by a volunteer who now struggles to maintain it because of other priorities. We would like to take over the maintenance of the app, and build out its functionality.
- Technology
- Distribution
- Funding and revenue model
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Technology: Our very popular Android app was created by a volunteer, and we would like to partner with an organisation that can help us create an IOS version of the app.
Distribution: we would like to partner with organisations that have cost-effective and innovative ways of getting their products to the people who need them.
Funding and revenue model: We would like to partner with organisations for whom literacy is a priority, and who are willing to dedicate funds to this.
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Director
Director