 Well, it looks like it's time for us to get started. Greetings, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from today. I'd like to welcome you to Engineering for Change, or E4C for short. Today we're very pleased to bring you the last in E4C's 2013 webinar series. We'll be starting over again in 2014. Today's webinar was developed in collaboration with Sharon Langevin and Samuel Alamanu. My name is Yana Aranda, and I'll be moderating today's webinar. When I'm not moderating webinars, I work with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, where I'm a senior program manager in our Engineering for Global Development Department. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit about today's webinar, Building a Successful Startup for Global Development. Education and information systems are two focus areas at E4C, and we're always seeking to share insights about innovative models for educational capacity building and underserved communities. To do so, we've invited today's presenters, Sharon Langevin, the Partnership Development Manager, and Samuel Alamanu, Assistant Manager of Compliance and Business Development in Ghana, for the world reader. We thank you for joining us today. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the E4C webinar series generally. Along with myself, we have Holly Schneider-Brown, Victoria Chung, and Alex Torres of IEEE who work on developing and delivering the webinar series. Thank you, team. It's been a good year. If anybody out there has questions about the series or would like to make a recommendation for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact us via the email address visible on the slide, webinars at engineeringforchange.org. Before we hand things over to our presenters for today, we thought it would be a great idea to remind you about Engineering for Change and who we are. E4C is a global community of now over 16,400 technically-minded members and more than 30,000 social media followers, such as engineers, technologists, representatives from NGOs, and social scientists who work together to solve critical humanitarian challenges, whether in water, energy, health, agriculture, sanitation, education, or other areas faced by underserved communities worldwide. We invite you to join E4C by becoming a member. E4C membership provides cost-free access to a growing inventory of field-based solutions and related information from all the members of our coalition, including professional societies such as ASME, IEEE, ASCE, SWE, and ASHRAE, as well as academic supporters such as MIT's D-LAB, International Development Agency like USAID, EWDUSA, and Practical Action, as well as access to a passionate, engaged community working to make people's lives better all over the world. Registration is easy and it's free. Check out our website, engineeringforchange.org, to learn more and sign up. The webinar you are participating in today is one installment of the Engineering for Change webinar series. This free, publicly available series of online seminars showcases the best practices and thinking of leaders in the field who bring leading edge technology and solutions to bear on global humanitarian and development challenges. Information on upcoming installments in this series, as well as archive videos of past presentations, can be found on our webinar page. And the URL is visible right here. You can also check out the archive on our YouTube channel. If you're on Twitter, I'd like to also invite you to join the conversation about today's webinar with the hashtag for C-webinar also visible here. So, you've received next webinar. Oh, goodness, I think we had missed a slide. There we go, apologies. You've received next webinar. On Tuesday, January 21st, 2014, at 11 a.m. eastern standard with Wash Tech, on the topic of from technologies to lasting services, identifying and addressing barriers to sustainability. We're very thrilled to have three presenters on our next webinar, who will be Joe Smith of IRC International Water and Suspension Center, Andre Allsiches of the SCAP Foundation, and Benedict II-IV of Trendagano. To learn more and register, please visit the E-1st U.S. webinar page in about 24 hours, when we'll put up the registration link. If you're already an E-1st member, we'll be sending you an invitation soon as well. More incentive for you guys to sign up as members. So, a few housekeeping items before we get started. Let's see where everyone is from today. In the chat window on the right-hand side of the screen, please type your location. I'll start as an example. There we go. We'd like to see where everyone is from today to get a sense of who's coming. Any technical questions or miniature problems should go into the same chat window. Of course, you can feel free to send a private chat to Holly or myself. So, it looks like we have folks from all over the U.S., Columbus, Ohio, Texas, Virginia Beach, Cleveland, Tampa, Washington, D.C., and it's fairly very cold in Wisconsin. We feel you. I'm sure the people of Florida don't feel the same. We also have folks from Italy, Trinidad. Very cool. Welcome to everyone today from wherever you may be joining us. Thank you. Oh, Ecuador. There we go one more. You can also use the chat window to type in any remarks you may have. During the webinar, please use the Q&A window, which is located directly below the chat window, to type in your questions for the presenter that allows us to keep track of all the questions. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any troubles, try hitting stop and then start. If that doesn't work, you can use the call-in number for the teleconference. You may also want to try opening up WebEx in a different browser. Following the webinar, to request a certificate of completion showing one professional development hour of the community for your license, please follow the instructions on the top of our webpage, engineeringforchange-webinars.org. So with all those instructions behind us, I'd like to introduce you to today's presenters. First, you have Sharon Langevin, who works closely with organizations and schools for a part of World Readers' partnership program, World Readers Kits, to ensure successful projects and lasting impact. We worked with Sharon quite a bit through Engineering for Change previously and we're thrilled to have the presenters today. Samuel Olemnou, since imagining ground operations for world renegade programs, he operates out of the schools in charge of designing and documenting day-to-day activities and out of classroom experiences with an eye towards scalability and sustainability. We're thrilled to have you both join us today and share some of your insights. With that, I'll hand it over to Sharon. Okay. Hi, everyone. This is Sharon. Thank you so much, Yana, for that great introduction and thanks so much to the E4C and ASME and IEEE and everyone who's been involved in putting this webinar series on. We're really happy to be able to be here today to present all of you and we're really excited to tell you a little bit more about what we've been working on for the last almost four years now at World Reader. So World Reader was started, I guess in 2009, and the way the idea came about was our founder, David Risher, who's a former executive from Amazon, was traveling with his family in Ecuador. So I'm excited that we actually have someone on the call today from Ecuador, but that's where the idea came from. He was visiting an orphanage in Ecuador and he saw there was a locked room. He said, you know, what's in there? And they said, oh, that's our library. And he thought, wow, okay, I'd like to check that out. So he said, you know, do you have the key? Can I see inside? And they told him, I think we've lost the key. And so just having been traveling with his family, he has two daughters, both of whom had e-readers on this trip so that they could keep up with their reading as they were traveling with the family, and going to a place where there were so many children who had no books at all. And having been someone who was an avid reader his entire life, he thought, wow, there's something out there, there's a technological tool that we might be able to use to solve this problem. So the problem that we're looking at is there are about 200 million children right now in South Saharan Africa who don't have any books of their own. There are schools, many schools look a lot like this. This is a library at a school in Ghana. They have shelves but no books. And often there are libraries, there are many libraries out there that do have some books, but a lot of them are not culturally relevant books, or they're at the incorrect level. You find we found in one school, the history of Utah, which we thought how many American kids actually want to read about the history of Utah, let alone someone in Kenya or Ghana or South Africa or one of the other countries where we work. So we thought maybe we can use technology to help overcome some of these, the challenges of transporting books, of shipping books from abroad into the country, of getting them actually directly to children. Why can't we deliver a book to anyone who has a mobile phone or has access to either a 3G or a Wi-Fi connection? Anywhere you can make a phone call, you should be able to also read a book. So that's sort of the challenge that we're looking at is there are many, many children out there who do not have the learning materials that they need to succeed, and we want every one of these kids to have the books that they need to improve their lives. So this is a photo from one of our projects in Kenya. This project started a couple of years ago, I think in 2010 or early 2011. And what we did initially is we took 20 e-readers to Ghana and we said, you know, can e-readers work? Is this something that's going to be useful in a classroom? How can we really empower teachers? Because it's not just about delivering these devices to kids with books on them. It's up to the teachers and the other people in the communities where we work to actually build a culture of reading and, you know, encourage these students to read the books that are available to them. So we went into Ghana and we said, okay, let's go into a classroom. Let's work with the teachers. Let's see if these students are able to pick up easily how to use the e-reader and let's see if they're actually going to read any books. And what we found is that students were downloading lots of books on their own using the 3G connection that they were really improving their kind of confidence in class. We found a lot of really great initial results. And I won't go into too much detail because Samuel's going to take us a bit more through the detail of what we've done. But we spent a long time refining our model in the very beginning and coming up with a way to, you know, both provide access to books but also make it possible for these students to be encouraged to read by the people around them. And so we're not just providing any books. Another big piece of what we do is we actually work with local African publishers in the countries where we have programs so that we have digitized over a thousand titles. I think almost nearly 1,200 titles from various publishers all across Sub-Saharan Africa. Even in Kenya alone, we digitized over 600 different titles in English, in Kikwa Hili, both textbooks and storybooks. Because we're not just here to deliver any book to a child. We want to deliver the right books. So we work really hard to, and we are right now, we have one of the largest culturally relevant libraries, digital libraries available there. Both on e-readers and, which I focus a lot on our e-reader programs is where we do a lot of work in classrooms. And we'll talk a little bit later more about the work that we're doing with mobile phones. But the libraries on both are similar in that they are not just bringing in international books. We're trying to get local books, as many local books as we can, on these platforms. Because having the right book, that's what really makes children want to read. Bringing them a book that's really going to inspire them to become an e-reader is really important in terms of their educational outcomes in the long run. And also, we want kids to start reading in the local language and then be able to transition over to English. Even within countries where a lot of the digital books that we distribute are being published, the distribution of those paper books is very low. So in addition to providing a way for students to access more reading material, we're also providing a way for publishers to actually spread their content and distribute it more widely. So that's sort of the in a nutshell overview of how we started and the kind of components of some of the components of the model that we've developed so far. And I'm, oh, yeah, sorry. So let me just talk a little bit about where we work. So as I mentioned, we have both e-reader programs and a mobile phone application that works on feature phones and on Android. So right now with e-readers, we're working in nine different countries in Africa, which you can see here, two varying degrees in different countries through both some projects which are directly implemented and some through partners, which I know will explain the difference between those in a minute. And then our mobile application is being used all over the world. So there's a lot of very average readers on our mobile app in India. Ethiopia is a big one, Nigeria. And we found a lot of interesting things through some of the research that we've done on the app, which I will go into a little bit later on in the presentation. So with that, I'm going to pass it over to Samuel and he's going to go into a little bit more detail on what does our model actually look like when we're doing implementation? What are the different ways that we work and talk a little bit about the impact that we're going to see so far? Thank you, Sharon. I hope everyone can hear me. So basically, we'll be there working on two main platforms, and Sharon has already mentioned. Our basic mission is to make books more accessible and we want to get books everywhere where you have mobile connectivity. And so we have to give you that platform and then we have the mobile platform. We build a mobile app with the partnership with Vartan and a mobile app developer in Australia. We want to come up with a mobile app that can make books more accessible and we have about four million people who download in this mobile app and we have five hundred thousand readers that are reading in this mobile app. Okay, so we have to learn so much from the field there after our first launch. We realize that when we can actually make books more accessible and get books everywhere that we need to come up with a model that will help us launch projects in different places without being there and managing the program. So what we came up with is what we came up with is basically what we hold the world with our packets. Okay, and so with the world packets what we do is we put 15 e-readers in books and in each of the e-readers we put 100 e-books and since one of our key main writers is local content which we work with and are involved to choose for the specific location in question and apart from the 50 locally relevant content that I chose we also add 50 foreign content we very good content that we've had in our partnership with major problems in houses like around the house and I can tell. Apart from the kids, 3-3 work in partnership with individuals and private donors to launch in various places and we have kids in Kenya we have kids in Malawi and I believe Sean is going to see more about some of our kids projects We also work with major international individuals and international organizations like USAID to launch programs to launch programs like we have in Ghana the first program we have was the IE program and this we did in conjunction with USAID and then for that program we have gone in in Ghana for the also in conjunction with USAID Australia IED and international in general like local vision so this is our the Kenya USAID we launch our programs we use a direct model and we use a kids model okay now this interesting chart you see here it's from offense program, the IE program a year after we launched okay it's very interesting when you really look at this chart the difference that can actually happen in the learning abilities of children you see that when the control students were tested there was a 3% of ability of reading and then the boys were 10% so the difference between boys and girls was really wide and after this student regaining access to books you can see the girls totally and absolutely closing the gap which is we regaining the gap in society and well we are effect here is astounded what is even more interesting is when you go into reading there are some of the effects that actually cause the results that we had in WTO the fact that this year we are taking the devices home and we read before class and they reading and all that things like improvement in their self-expression and increase engagement in reading the device is just like a boy told me it's just magical you press and pages are flipped and nothing else you can look up words which is magical for the boys to have access to these things and they have access to books which is actually empowering the students to become more of who they are so in the picture you see a young man here and when I was volunteering for WTO as a student mentor on that day the discussion was the prayer post and I asked him what he wanted to do and he said why and he told me that he wanted to be a missionary doctor you have one minute remaining yes a missionary doctor was because he really wanted to help people and we think that being just a doctor will be working in the hospital by being a missionary doctor means traveling and helping sick people and this has been a resource of WTO direct from the program but you also have for parents a student student it appears you may have lost Samuel would you be able to I think maybe we can try to bring Samuel back we can come back to the slide but I can tell you a little bit about Ocontacate I don't actually know the story about Stanley unfortunately but let me just try to pick up from there Ocontacate is another one of the students that participated in the IRB program Samuel had mentioned was the first large scale program that we implemented in Ghana in partnership with USAID so she was one of the students who was in one of the first classrooms that we ever provided you readers for in Ghana and through her exposure to more books and participating in the world's reader program and some of the outside of the classroom experiences that we do which are sort of extracurricular type reading related activities so reading stories and acting out parts of the book that you liked or writing a new ending to a story we have a whole bunch of different we have a whole bunch of lesson plans that are associated with that so through that experience she was really inspired partly to read more but also to become a writer so she after participating in our program she said that she started writing poetry and she said that she wants to become the most famous writer in the world and so I mean there's a lot of other sort of student stories like O'Conn to Kate but I think the kind of message here is that it's not just about reading more books and doing better on exams it's also about exposing students to new ideas and empowering them to go forward and achieve the things that they they want to achieve okay so let me move on to the next part so that kind of tells you a little bit about sort of some of the direct implementation that we've done so there are two projects in Ghana right now there's IREAD and then there's also the all-children we're part of the all-children reading grand challenge that was put forth by U.S. aid and off aid and World Vision so that's a second program in Ghana and both of these programs are they involve e-reader use in the classroom students are taking them home at night to read and it also involves some teacher training so we're actually partnered with a foundation called the Owinga Foundation in Ghana and they are providing teacher training to see the teachers that are part of the both of the programs that we're doing in Ghana and then in addition to that we also have a couple of direct implementation projects in Kenya part one that we've worked on over the course of the past year is that we've been one of the partners in well so we've been one of the kind of so there's a big project that's being run by U.S. aid and RTI in Kenya called Primer and it's looking at ICT interventions in primary schools in Kenya looking for something that's cost-effective and can scale up so we were one of the kind of interventions that was being tested so looking at giving e-readers to students in grade one and allowing them to have access to over a hundred books take them to and from school use them in class etc. and we found through that study we saw that of the three interventions the kids with e-readers improved their reading skills the most so that was a very promising result we've seen in Kenya and we're about to launch a new project in partnership with the Gates Foundation which we're super excited about that will also be in Kenya and that is a project where we're partnering with aid public and private libraries in western Kenya to look at you know how do e-readers really work in a library setting we've done a little bit of work with libraries although we've predominately been working with schools and we're looking to kind of do more research learn how this can work kind of where you know what's the best way to implement a project in a library we have a lot of knowledge now about how e-readers work in schools and what the kind of essential components are in terms of how you actually organize such a program and we want to have similar knowledge for libraries so I think Sammy is back and I'm going to let him wrap up a little bit on the student story side and then I'll keep talking a little bit more about our world reader kits project ah there you are okay go ahead yeah so basically I was telling you the story on this is O'Connor Cate O'Connor Cate also was in O'Connor and then she read a book she read a book by an old porn and this is one of the the most similar to O'Connor and that's how O'Connor Cate read the story of from the senior letter she also inspired her own short story and before after getting access to books came pop from school now and I remember me taking one time in school and his teacher was telling him something different in the class so they had a heated argument and it turned out that he was right and these are some of the things that have sort of been at a level and we we can measure them during our volunteer evaluation period but this was to say that there's so many things happening so many things happen once you have access to books there's not been that much time the world without knowledge is going as really transformation so let me I'll take it back or so I thought sorry are you all yeah so just getting back to where we left off I talked a little bit about some of the research that we've done and one of the things that we built into every single one of our projects but most specifically the projects where we've been the direct implementer that we're always doing monitoring and evaluation from day one we've built in measurement into what we do and so that's been the important part of actually building up the institutional knowledge that we've developed over the past four years so that's been a big component of some of the direct implementation projects that we've done and so I'm looking a little bit more I'm talking a little bit more about our partnership program we've done similar types of types of work there building in the monitoring and evaluation is something that we're working on right now through our partners we've done some we've had a lot of great qualitative feedback from partners through our partnership program and now we're looking to build in some more quantitative types of measures into that program as well so one of our big focuses as an organization has really been to measure what it is that we're doing so that we can talk about what works and what doesn't work and know that what we're saying is based on things that we've actually measured in the field as we're implementing programs so through our partnership program we've now reached I think like 25 different schools across 9 different countries in Sub-Saharan Africa we have quite a big cohort in Kenya I think we're working with about 12 schools and we reached recently about a month ago I was in Kenya and we launched our largest single deployment of e-readers so far we've worked with a school I'll just tell you a little bit about a couple of the schools where we work so we work both in urban and in rural areas in Kenya we just launched this very large program with a school in Nairobi so they're just outside of Kibera which is one of the largest swarms in Sub-Saharan Africa and the largest one in Kenya they're just outside of that swarm and all of the students who attend this school live in Kibera or they live on the outskirts of Kibera and most of them many of them are HIV positive most of all of them have lost at least one parent to HIV some of them are orphans and this school was started about several years ago at this point and they have now brought 350 e-readers with 160 yeah I think 140 books each so essentially we delivered one of the largest libraries in Kenya to this school 49,000 books so if you think about how much space 49,000 books would take if you wanted to ship it it would be really expensive and it would take up probably a shipping container worth of books but we were able to ship that in five boxes or six boxes so if you think about it that way you deliver an e-reader to a place once the e-reader is there if you want you can deliver unlimited books to that e-reader or to a mobile phone or to a tablet or whatever the device is that you want to use to access this content and from our perspective although we've done a lot of work with e-readers and so far we're definitely very much device diagnostic and our goal really is just to deliver books at scale whatever way it makes the most sense so that's one of our tools another tool that we I worked with on our last trip is in a rural village in Masailand in Kenya and they in Masailand there's a big problem with women attending school about only 11% of girls are completing primary school because about 90% of them by age 13, 14, 15 are being circumcised and married off at a super young age so for them the school that we're working with is providing an opportunity for these girls to avoid female genital mutilation and also be able to attend school and finish primary school and go on to secondary school so that was a really great experience as well and I think we have a huge range of partners we're very open to working with smaller organizations, large organizations we really just want to reach the most students that we can so let me go on to the next thing so after the last three, four years of some experimentation and a lot of kind of building up of our institutional knowledge we really want to scale up what we're doing so there are a couple different ways that we're looking to scale up one is scaling up some of our large scale work so bringing on new large NGO multilateral partners so one of those is UNHCR we'll actually be launching a program with them early next year in a couple of refugee settlements in Tanzania as a pilot project with hope of scaling that up to a lot more refugee settlements in camps so the idea is there are so many refugee populations out there that really don't have any access to educational material so let's see if we can use you readers there are a good solution to enabling these populations to access the learning material that they need to succeed so we'll be doing some work with e-readers and also some work with tablets in that program but we're also looking at other large scale partners like Save the Children or UNICEF or these big, big, big players that do a lot of work in education we have built up a large, large library of content at this point that we want to distribute it to as many different children and families as we can so that's one avenue another avenue you can see the signboard in the middle that is from the school that I was mentioning that serves the students in Kibera that I was just talking about so that's our largest deployment so far so we want to both add more e-readers to the schools that we're already working with as well as find lots more partners who are interested in bringing our program to their schools so we're hoping to scale that up as well get lots more partners in the nine countries where we work potentially also expand to new geographies but probably we'll know a little more about that next year but we've gotten lots of inquiries from many, many different places and so we want to be able to serve as many of them as we can helping them to bring e-readers potentially working also with phones and tablets at some of our schools as well and then finally we have the world reader mobile our app which you see there on the right it works on very basic phones any phone that can access the internet even if it's not a smart phone you can read free books on that phone so it's a really simple small application we've worked with a company called Bynu which does it's basically working to provide a smart phone like experience on a feature phone and so they do a ton of data compression in the cloud and that enables them to minimize the cost of someone of the actual user and downloading data on Facebook or YouTube or Twitter which are some of the apps that are part of Bynu but world reader mobile is also part of Bynu and that's where you can read tons of free books books and publishers all over the world we have material material and tons of different languages and we are hoping to really scale up the usage of that so we've been working on a research project on world reader mobile as well as I mentioned earlier research and measuring what we do is a very big part of what we do and so we've been working on a research project with UNESCO and Nokia to look at the usage of our app so Bynu has been very helpful in opening up their data their data to us so that we can see what's being used the most what kinds of books are people reading where are people reading the most and I mentioned a little bit earlier that India Pakistan we have a lot of readers in Mexico Nigeria Ethiopia we have a strong reader population in Kenya as well and what we've found is that while the majority of our users are men I think it's about 70 or 80% of the users of the app are men likely because men are often the owners of the phone we found that all of our power users are women so people who are actually reading multiple books a month they're all women so that's been one really interesting finding and another thing that we've found through the research we've done in our mobile app is that many parents and caregivers are reading to their kids using their mobile phones so about 30% of our users are already using their mobile phone to read children's stories to their kids and an additional 30% told us that if there were more content available for me I would read to my children and so that's a huge opportunity right there, there's a phone in almost every household there's a phone in almost every community in the world so if you think about that you could provide content to all of those people and they could all be reading to their kids they could all be reading stories reading romance novels or learning how to read there's so much opportunity there to provide the right content to people using phones and using the networks that are already existing out there in the world so that's another area that we're looking at in terms of scale we are even looking at things like purchasing digital rights to books and then distributing them at massive scale for free, things like that so that's kind of how we're looking to scale up and then I wanted to talk a little bit about what we've learned so just getting back to the title of our webinar which is looking at how do you actually build a successful start-up if you're in the humanitarian sphere in global development so I think as I mentioned a little bit before refining your models is really really important so build, measure, learn kind of the lean start-up idea I think that at Worlds Reader we've really taken that on we started really small we went into one classroom in Ghana with 20 readers and said okay let's test this out let's see what happens let's figure out where we're failing and let's improve on those areas so I think built in with this attitude of let's look at this as a learning experience has very much benefited us that's enabled us to be very open to making changes or adding new components or removing things that we were doing before and that's enabled us to come up with a model that really does work that is both replicable across different geographies but it's also customizable and can be contextualized to different contexts so for example one of the things that we require of our partners is that they develop policies for what happens if an e-reader breaks or is lost and just the simple act of going through the process of bringing folders together to actually come up with that policy is really important because it gets into who actually owns the devices who is responsible for taking care of them etc and that's something that we learned because we in the very early days we found that we were having some really big issues with screen breakages and so knowing what to do when that happened was very important so the kind of end of the screen story is that we worked with Amazon to get stronger screens built onto the devices and now we don't have we are breakage rate is probably 3-4% across all of our projects so really focusing on starting small, building up your model and learning from everything that you do so don't do pilots about measuring. I think the measurements that we've done so far, quantitative qualitative etc have been extremely beneficial to us. Okay and then second I think fostering strong partnerships has been really important from our perspective we want tons of competition out there we want lots of people trying to distribute this digital content because the more content providers out there the more access students get to the materials that they need and the other thing is that we can't reach everyone alone you know we started out with being the direct implementer of our very first project in Ghana and that was great we learned a lot from it but at the same time we realized we don't want to be a bottleneck here we want to be able to work with other people out there who share a similar mission to us so let's go and find partners who want to bring e-readers to their schools and let's create a way that they can do that without having to have us there on the ground we don't want to be holding anyone back and then the third part I think is around as a social enterprise we do look at ways that we can make money or make income so that we can sustain our programs I think we're funding about 25% of our operations at this point from revenue but so looking at creating these incentive structures in revenue streams even if they are very small and it's more of a long-term proposition it's still super important so one of the ways that we've done this is the work that we do with publishers for example in Subterran Africa is what we've done is created something that makes sense for both sides so for us we really want more digital content on our platform and not just any digital content we want the books from the countries where we work so we go to publishers and we convince them that digital publishing is a good idea although a lot of that groundwork has now been laid for us and we say okay so we want to bring these books to our students can we work with you we take on a lot of the cost of the digitization which is quite expensive especially for textbooks and then we basically distribute all of their content like they don't have to they were basically a distributor and we're marketing a lot of their books by saying to our partners hey we have these books from these publishers available in digital form which one do you want and they're basically all they have to do is help us with the digital files and from there we basically are doing the whole sale cycle for them so from the publishers perspective they're just getting a check from us they make 70% off of whatever we sell and we also make money for 70% on each sale so that being said we also discount heavily the books that we sell to our partners all of the books that we digitize are available to anyone in the world on Amazon on the Amazon store because we do currently work with the Kindle and in addition to that our partners get it at a discount so that's one area where we kind of created an incentive for publishers to work with us but we're also building in a revenue stream there I think looking at your model carefully and thinking about what will people actually pay for how much will they pay for it how much money can we make off of that then is that something that's going to be sustaining that's going to help sustain us in the long run I mean the more projects we have the more content is being purchased and once a book has been digitized essentially it's just there it's available and the more copies we can sell of that particular book the faster we can recoup our investment in its digitization so those are some of the things I think that we've learned as an organization and that I think has contributed to our success and so I think I want to leave some time for everyone to ask questions so this is just some information about if you want to get involved with WorldVeter or learn more about us you can apply to become a partner the URLs there you can email us if you're interested in volunteering you can go on our website and learn more about our results we have probably five or ten different research reports on our learning page and then you can also find us on Facebook and Twitter and follow us or if you want to download WorldVeter Mobile you can go to that website or we're also in the Google place or if you have Android so thank you so much everyone for listening and hopefully you have some good questions for us yes thank you so much Erin and Sammy and for all our listeners now if you have questions be sure to post them in the Q&A window which is immediately below the chat window we already have some questions that come in so I'm going to move on to those so the first question is I guess regarding the origins and if you could share a little bit with us regarding where initial funding came from for WorldVeter so the very initial funding I think we were one of our some of the initial funding were privately donated from one of our co-founders but the the kind of first outside funder that we have I believe was USAID the first that's on the pilot program that we did in Ghana and that was super fortunate honestly they took a little bit of a risk on us gave us some money to do a pilot and see where things went and fortunately things worked out well and they've now been a good partner of us over time but yeah I think the break that we had in the beginning was getting those funds from USAID so that we could really do a more in depth research assessment of what we were doing that's fantastic so I have a few more questions we're going to come back to some of the business questions in a bit but there is a I guess from the engineers in the crowd of course we're coming back to the practicalities of power supply how big of an issue is power availability in areas where more of the year is working so far many of our schools are on the grid so I mean I can talk a little bit about Kenya and then I think Sammy can tell us more about his experiences in Ghana but so far I would say the majority of the people coming through our partnership program a lot of them are online so that kind of it does kind of limit us a little bit in terms of who we're able to reach and because the people who find us are probably people who have power although we do work with a few schools that run off of solar power so e-readers are basically the charge an e-reader you need about as much power as you need to power a mobile phone so a very small simple solar panel can charge an e-reader quite easily and we have also developed some solar cases which Samuel can tell us more about because the testing on those has been going on in Ghana and we are in addition to that we're also looking at other small scale solar power systems that are 100 dollars or so something that could actually power several lights or charge a bunch of different devices at the same time and we're actually in the process of we're actually hiring someone who's looking for someone who can help us to do some further development in the area of solar but I want to give a little bit about a lot to say that the job opportunity that you're going to make available to everybody to know about have a lot of interesting folks on the call so Sammy can you share with us some of the experiences from Ghana specifically around this issue yeah there's actually a lot to the folks that are in the western parts of the area I don't know if you know you might be you make sure that they have power and so because we know there's a limitation that in some parts you don't have to get them can't be easy now like I just said we've been working to develop competitive to make this possible like I just mentioned we've been trying out and we've been trying out feedback to the manufacturer and improvements are being done to make it more suitable for the environment and one interesting thing about the UWU in Kenya is that now it's been like 34 weeks and so I believe that the precedent that we had we're not having any with the government but we did ask UWU that they use the power batteries and it's hard to deploy a small house and because of the minimal part of the insular the UWU doesn't need to work it's very easy to find slowly trying to make possible for us to get them going very cool, thank you thank you so much we're going to loop around back now from the practical aspects of the technology and come back to the teachers which are obviously so critical in ensuring that students use the EU years effectively they also take advantage of the lesson plans that you mentioned so can you speak a little bit about the profile of the teachers that you are working with and what type of education these teachers generally have what degree of education I suppose and whether extending from that, whether adoption of the EU years has been a challenge for the teachers as opposed to students basically with those who are working here in Ghana all the teachers are working in our government and the teachers that I found they train in college we have teachers I never said that they were running into a century that are technology immigrants it's okay just because we are not we are old, we have 15 you know, we are now kind of adapt to computers and to technology but it takes us a day of training to just get this into the board when we are going to get through the lunch and so first of all we choose the headmaster we train the headmaster on how to use the EU years and for example in this crew everyone that was the headmaster will use the law for the 8 years and we train them on how to use the EU years and then he trains the teachers on how to use the EU years before the teachers train so we need to improve the amount of technology in the granting codes to get into the to catch up on the EU years the EU years it's very interesting so yeah just to add a little bit to that in addition to doing the technical training a big part of what we do is kind of project management training for the project manager that Sammy was mentioning and so that's basically it's around administration of the program so at every project that we do with the partner there's a local project manager at the school where we that we partnered with and their job they have a we have a whole job description for them and we also train them on what their responsibilities are so making sure that you readers are charged working closely with teachers and students making sure that everyone's getting trained and that follow up training is available if needed in terms of the technical training on the device and then also making sure that you readers are being shared between different classrooms some schools choose to have kind of open library hours after school or on Saturdays so the project manager is in charge of facilitating all of that use and so we work with them to give them just suggestions on this is what our other partners have done but it's very specific to the school so the school decides how and when they're going to use the e-readers and we just provide support to help them design that program that's fantastic so in terms of now that you have obviously such increasing penetration and access to so many individuals that question came in regarding a little bit more coming back to your business model what the mobile app specifically considering that the books are available free for the user are there any plans to raise revenue by utilizing the user base for advertising or consumer insect surveys and to sell that is that something that's been considered yeah so one of the with the mobile app so far we honestly we haven't done any advertising at all on the mobile app there's been no marketing and so we've managed to get up to some months like half a million users reading books which is really encouraging and I'd say in terms of advertising I'm not sure exactly what our plans are that's definitely one route that we may go down we're definitely looking at paid content on the app so right now we have predominantly free content on the mobile app but we're looking at ways to get more more books on there and one of the ways to do that is to get better content is to allow publishers to provide paid content we're really just still working out how the whole payment process would work that's honestly the most complicated part but I think in terms of revenue these book sales potentially advertisements we're actually in the process of building version we're on I think version 2 so far so we're in the process of building version 3 of our app and that should be hopefully available sometime next year but it will be a little a little bit less we've got kind of a lot going on on the app right now so we're going to be doing a little bit of simplifying and that will provide more space and possibility for doing things like advertising yeah I see so in the interim while you guys are thinking through that future direction a question came in and maybe it's related to this so I'd like to continue on that note is the notion of selling books at a heavy discount obviously requires you to establish appropriate pricing for your partner how have you guys gone about that what has been effective for you all in determining these appropriate pricing models so I actually am not 100% familiar with how we arrived at the price that we are at now but I think it's right now we're charging the same for every book so if you are one of our partners basically you get access to our library of content which includes both books from African publishers and books from international publishers as Sammy was describing earlier so we sell the books from African publishers for $1 per book and for each book that you purchase from an African publisher we'll give you a book from an international publisher for free so we work with publishers like Random Palace and Penguin and Simon & Schuster who all have really fantastic books and they donate some of their books for us to distribute for free because we're working in areas where access to books is so limited and so we have things like the Magic Treehouse series which I'm sure some of the people out there read when they were kids or have read to their own children we also have some Jerry Spinelli in there there's a bunch of different kinds of stuff that we get from international publishers but we found that an average price point of about $0.50 a book is very affordable for partners and in addition to that we've done a whole kind of work working with Amazon to get we're buying Kindle that's probably the lowest price point of anyone we also get donations from other companies for the cases, protective cases and protective skins and things with the devices but when you look at everything all in the device plus 100 books you're paying $150 so if you look at it at a per book cost you're essentially paying $1.50 per book including the price wow that's certainly very affordable and I'm sure that a lot of folks on the phone here and junior engineers are probably hoping that you guys have bought the Builder or something to that effect available on the Kindle version for our kids as well encourage them all to go into engineering so lots of yeah last question but now we've got because we have one minute and maybe you can share with us considering the fact that you are a fairly unique service out there maybe you can give us an idea if you have any competitors just to this model of delivering books on e-readers some of our competitors let's see okay so there are a couple of other I would say in terms of competition a lot of what's going on right now in the ed tech space is and kind of the there's a lot going on in e-learning ed tech right now and I wouldn't necessarily consider them competitors per say but there's a lot going on with platform developments if you look at players like Samsung or Intel or these big technology providers a lot of them are looking at e-learning and M-learning programs as kind of CSR initiatives so you know Intel wants tablets with their Intel chips in them being used in education things like that so I think you know they're on the one hand they are a bit of competition but on the other hand I mean we can always be a content provider for those types of platforms so that's really where we're looking at we're not necessarily in it to be we're definitely not in it to be the only platform provider we're in it to distribute as much content as we can because honestly that's where we're actually making income that can help spread our program much wider so I would say that Samsung I know is doing work Intel is doing work there's a few smaller organizations that are distributing e-readers there's one in Kenya which is called Read and Prosper Grow and Prosper I forget and then there's some really interesting stuff going on in Zambia with tablets there's an organization called iSchool that makes something called the Zeducad which I believe is a Kindle fire but I haven't confirmed that yet but they have digitized the Zambian national curriculum and they're distributing that on an educational tablet they're a company that's selling tablets to schools and there's the organization iSchool is working on developing this kind of school in the box program and there are a few other people that are doing better working with those tablets in Zambia as well considering the number of schools out there and then you just feel great I guess the more organizations I can get to this space frankly the better definitely I mean getting more content yeah more platforms more content I think is only a good thing for everyone we couldn't agree more with you Sharon and we are over time guys I know there's a lot of more questions and if we didn't get to your question I have a slide up here indicating the email address for Sharon and Sammy so feel free to reach out and ask your questions to them directly or make donations or I recommend partnerships and ask for organization. I'd like to thank you everybody for attending and I'd definitely like to thank one of our presenters we really appreciate you dialing in from Ghana Sammy and we apologize for any technical difficulties such as the nature of the jig for those of you who are interested in receiving the professional development hours our code is listed here please include that follow the instructions on our web page to receive that PH if you have additional questions regarding webinar series I would like to recommend a speaker or a subject matter for another webinar our email addresses webinars at engineeringforchanged.org and don't forget to become a member so we can share information about our upcoming webinars for that I thank you all I wish you a happy afternoon morning or evening wherever you may be and we look forward to seeing you on our next webinar in the new year greetings to everyone and a happy and healthy new year take care