Together, let's equip parents, caregivers and early education facilitators with literacy and learning tools to help children thrive.
The Grand Challenge
Despite several decades of focusing on improving access to quality education for all children, learning outcomes continue to remain low, with fewer than half of the world’s school-aged children learning to read on grade level or gaining basic numeracy skills, according to the World Bank. As more than 85 percent of a child’s brain is developed by age 6, a growing body of evidence suggests investing in high-quality pre-primary education—providing young children with the foundational skills needed to support grade-level learning—to be an effective pathway to addressing the global learning crisis. Yet 175 million children globally are not enrolled in pre-primary education during these vital years of their lives. COVID-19 has only exacerbated these challenges, as millions more children have missed out on early childhood education due to closures of childcare and early education facilities due to the pandemic.
The Big Idea
The Ready2Read Challenge calls on global solvers to propose existing or adapted EdTech solutions and activities that enable marginalized children ages 3 to 6 to build foundational language and literacy skills at home and at school. In addition to targeting key foundational language and literacy skills—including alphabetic knowledge, phonological awareness, expressive vocabulary, and listening comprehension—solutions should also support parents, caregivers, teachers and/or facilitators with resources and tools to assist in filling gaps in early learning among children, especially due to COVID-19 and other crises.
Prize Partners
The ACR GCD Founding Partners thank the following organizations for their collaboration on this competition.
There are no partners at this time. Please check back later.
Introducing 400 Talking Books into 50 Early Childhood Development centers in rural Malawi to contribute to pre-literacy skills of children ages 4-6 years old.
Providing children and their family members in Nepal with an evidence- and UDL-based approach that sparks curiosity and increases oral language and pre-reading skills
Improving parent-school and parent-child relationships through the development of relevant reading materials for students and teaching aids for parents and educators
Improving first and second language reading skills of ethnic minority primary school children by supplying teachers and students with early grade, bilingual educational materials
Increasing the availability of culturally-responsive and context-relevant multilingual education materials in mother tongue languages for primary schools in Bandarban District, Bangladesh
Creating and distributing children-authored books in Creole to address the shortage of Creole reading materials and to foster a love of reading in children
Increasing the reading achievement levels of young learners through implementation of research-based, context-relevant literacy curricula and materials
Creating high-quality, mother-tongue materials through LubutoLiteracy, a low-cost digital platform that used local teachers to build lessons in seven languages
Using easy, computer-based instruction for literacy learning in primary schools, Bridges to the Future - South Africa, to help students hear, identify and manipulate phonemes
Utilizing a phonic and syllabic approach to reading in their mother tongue, Enlightening the Hearts Literacy Campaign accelerates students’ ability to develop a second language
Using the School Basic e-Learning Libraries (BeLLs), Ghana Reads introduces educational content for students and teachers to address the lack of high quality reading materials
Improving reading skills of children with special needs using by providing teaching and learning materials and assessment tools to teachers and resources and training for families
Conducting ‘Learn to Read, Read to Learn’ workshops to assist teachers in using innovative and digital learning materials and to help children improve their oral reading fluency
Influencing the Armenian education system by developing and testing a set of informal literacy assessments to better inform future literacy instruction
Using an early grade reading instruction curriculum (EGRIC), in print and electronic format, to provide teachers with high quality reading instruction materials and resources in English and Kiswahili
Developing reading benchmarks for new reading curriculum and a rapid reading response system (including the first literacy app in Khmer), to address reading difficulties for children in Cambodia
Examining the use of the CLA approach when shifting from supporting innovators/innovations at pilot (or proof of concept) stage to transitioning mature, evidence-based solutions for scale.
An integrated, mobile data collection and communication service that uses smartphones and tablets to transform paper forms into digital questionnaires, send group text messages and more.