The World Literacy Foundation and the Vizrt Group have announced an international charity partnership for 2020 to bring literacy skills to 500,000 highly disadvantaged children who can’t read or write.
The collaborative partnership will allow the World Literacy Foundation to harness the technology and expertise of the Vizrt Group in order to help reach their objective to give children from disadvantaged backgrounds access to books and learning resources.
The Vizrt Group has pledged to make a $250,000 donation encompassing technology, resources, expertise and cash.
Petter Ole Jakobsen, Founder and Chief Innovation Officer at the Vizrt Group, says; “We believe at the Vizrt Group that storytelling is one of the keys to a better-informed world. By making reading skills a priority for disadvantaged children we can stimulate their curiosity helping them to gain the skills that can change their world.”
In 2020, 770 million people in the world are illiterate and a further 2 billion people struggle to read a single sentence.
According to CEO of the World Literacy Foundation, Andrew Kay, this is an international disgrace and much more needs to be done.
Kay says, “We must provide every child a chance to learn to read. At the WLF we estimate the social and economic cost of illiteracy is hundreds of billions each year. If a child struggles to read, they often become an adult who struggles with issues related to unemployment, welfare, crime and health. Research tells us every $1 spent on quality literacy development, returns back $7 to the economy.”
Jakobsen states that “Video is the most effective form of digital communication out there today – and we happen to be experts in it. If we can utilise this expertise to help the WLF reach their goals in 2020 then we will be living and breathing our purpose as an organisation.”
Kay continues, “We hope that the partnership with the Vizrt Group can help us with several projects across the year including our Sun Books initiative. This initiative provides classrooms in Africa a new, innovative solar panel tablet device that will lift the reading skills of children in 1200 remote and significantly under-resourced classrooms, and mainly in places where there is limited internet connection and electricity.”
