Nonprofit Worldreader gives Kindles to students in sub-Saharan
Africa (and is working on a reading app for mobile phones). The
organization just published the results of iREAD, its year-long
pilot program in Ghana, and many of the findings are promising:
Primary school students with access to e-readers showed
significant improvement in reading skills and in time spent
reading, and the program is cost-effective. The theft rate was
“near-zero,” but nearly half the e-readers broke. USAID funded
the Worldreader Ghana study and independent firm ILC Africa did
the research. iREAD “involved the wireless distribution of over
32,000 local and international digital books using Kindle
e-readers to 350 students and teachers at six pilot schools in
Ghana’s Eastern Region between November 2010 and September
2011.” The full results are here (PDF). Some findings: - Kids
learned to use e-readers quickly even though 43 percent of them
had never used a computer before. Also, not surprisingly, they
were quick to discover “the mu