Begin With Books

Overview

<p><span style="font-size:small">A child's path to opportunity begins with literacy, and literacy begins with books. Join this global competition to create books for children in languages they use and understand.</span></p> <p> </p><p><span style="font-size:small">Literacy leads to better health, broadens employment opportunities, and creates safer and more stable societies. However, more than 387 million children are not expected to read or do basic math by the end of primary school.1 For the more than 93 million children with disabilities globally, learning outcomes are even lower, as they are less likely to go to school and have access to accessible learning resources. Building on a child’s language foundation, books pave the way for future success in life. Despite the importance of books in learning to read, there is a global shortage of books available for those learning to read in many languages and in accessible formats. The severe shortage these children encounter is known as the “book gap.”</span></p> <p> </p><p><span style="font-size:small">To address this challenge, All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR GCD), in collaboration with the Global Book Alliance (GBA), launched the Begin with Books prize competition challenging innovators globally to assemble cost-effective packages of high quality, accessible digital books for beginning readers in more than 30 designated underserved languages (spoken and signed) used in more than 15 countries. As part of the prize competition, solvers will be required to upload the books they develop to the Global Digital Library (GDL), a mobile and web platform offering a collection of high quality, open educational early grade reading resources in languages that children and their communities globally use and understand. The platform also facilitates translation and localization of GDL resources to more than 300 languages and growing.</span></p> <p> </p><p><span style="font-size:small">Solvers will assemble cost-effective packages of high quality, accessible digital books for beginning reading practice in eligible languages for each year of a child’s literacy development (including Pre-Primary, Kindergarten, Grades 1 and 2) and upload them to the Global Digital Library.</span></p> <div></div>