A Challenge for Technology

I want to throw out a challenge to all those technology gurus out there. We are involved in a tremendous charity that promotes and enables literacy in remote communities in Ghana. See their story on the website its amazing.

The central aims of Reading Spots are:

• To establish community-led libraries in remote areas, which are to be managed entirely by Ghanaian traditional leaders, elected Assemblies and local educational leaders.
• To increasingly work on ways to make the ‘spots’ sustainable through investment in solar power and establishment of entrepreneurship projects attached to the library.
• To create a volunteer network across Ghana with the enthusiasm and understanding to drive educational change in their communities.
• To ensure that these libraries provide reading resources free of charge (including at least 20% African fiction and non-fiction) to rural areas of Ghana where books are difficult to find, despite a great thirst for reading. All schools in the village should be able to use the library facilities during the school day and therefore this is the most cost effective way of supporting many schools. To provide, through the libraries, a place to study in the evenings and weekends, with electricity to work by and a desk to work on.
• To establish Reading Spots Readers’ Clubs and other activities in each library, with the hope that these clubs can share ideas for reading and writing between communities.
• To provide training for librarians, and create a system for Library Prefects in local schools, whereby older pupils mentor younger pupils.
• This investment in reading resources and offering a flexible place for community education will greatly improve literacy in rural communities in Ghana, where some figures suggest over 50% of adults are illiterate. Access to books in rural (and indeed urban) areas of Ghana is extremely limited. Very few schools have a functioning library, especially at the primary and junior levels.
• The charity's initiatives will turn improve learning standards, with increased understanding about health, further opportunities for employment and the likelihood that pupils will be able to progress onto secondary school.
• The charity has carefully considered the possible harms of creating community libraries, and have acted in various ways to minimise the possibility of dependency and neocolonialist narratives. They do not pay any ongoing costs to the library projects – communities sign an agreement to pay the cost of a librarian and electricity before the project starts. The Reading Spots’ libraries are run by Ghanaians for Ghanaians.

This magnificent charity has a challenge. A significant channel for education and literacy in our world today is access to the internet.

So how do we enable these remote communities to get cheap, reliable connection?