What is the name of your organization?
Nabu Global Inc.
What is the name of your solution?
NABU Multilingual Literacy Platform
Provide a one-line summary or tagline for your solution.
NABU is an edtech platform that provides children with access to high-quality, mother-tongue, bi-lingual content.
In what city, town, or region is your solution team headquartered?
New York City, NY
In what country is your solution team headquartered?
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What type of organization is your solution team?
Nonprofit
Film your elevator pitch.
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What specific problem are you solving?
Globally, 400M children lack adequate literacy to participate in their societies. In low- and middle-income countries, 53% of children cannot read and understand a simple story by the end of primary school. This crisis is driven by a scarcity of culturally relevant educational materials in mother tongue languages.
What is your solution?
NABU is a free, digital educational tool designed to enrich children's literacy by providing access to high-quality, bilingual content in mother tongue languages. Through our low-bandwidth app and web reader, NABU makes culturally relevant books accessible, especially in regions where physical books are scarce. The app, available on iOS and Android, allows children to download and read offline, ensuring wide accessibility. The NABU Web Reader, accessible here, was launched to support schools and libraries, making the platform available on laptops for classroom use. NABU's pedagogy is grounded in educational best practices, incorporating levelled and curated content that caters to various learning styles. By collaborating with local authors and illustrators, NABU ensures that the stories reflect the cultural nuances and daily realities of readers, fostering a sense of identity and belonging while enhancing language skills, comprehension, and critical thinking.
Who does your solution serve, and in what ways will the solution impact their lives?
NABU's target population are pre-primary school children, who currently have little or no access to fun, engaging storybooks in a language they speak or understand. Representing a staggering 40% of children globally, these young learners often have limited avenues to nurture their early literacy skills. This scarcity places them at an increased risk of academic challenges, including potential school dropout and lower literacy outcomes as they progress in their educational journey. NABU aims to foster inclusive and equitable access to books for children in our target markets. Exposure to NABU's storybooks allows children to connect with the reading material on a relevant and meaningful level, fostering sociolinguistic pride, motivation, love of reading, and sustained engagement with reading materials. Finally, we amplify pathways to literacy by spurring a culture of reading within the community and supporting children's psychological well-being through curated reading materials.
