Educating Rural Africa, One Kindle at a Time

An old problem has an update of a new solution: A former bigwig at Amazon has brought his company's e-reader into the forefront of the drive to provide more educational to the developing world. Specifically, Kindles are heading to Ghana.

David Risher, who used to be a senior vice-president at online retailing giant Amazon.com, has started Worldreader, a nonprofit dedicated to improving literacy in places where it can be hard to find. Among the startup ideas put forward by this startup is handing out Amazon's signature electronic-reading device, the Kindle, to children at schools in Accra, Ghana, in what the nonprofit hopes is a wider rollout across the country in the coming months.

This is certainly not an attempt to sell more Kindles, in Ghana or anywhere else; rather, the idea is to get students to read, using modern technology that can work in places where other modern technology might not.

Many rural African communities lack infrastructure for computers or even landline phones, but the people in many of these communities do have cellphones, which is where the Kindle comes in. This device runs on a GSM cellular network, so users can connect to a satellite network and update the contents of their e-reader (which is pre-loaded with lots of free books anyway).

Worldreader also discovered that the Kindles could be charged using specially designed solar chargers. Tests have revealed that charging a Kindle for one hour can result in a couple of weeks of use for the typical student.

This is very much in the vein of the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child), a program to bring computers to the developing world that aims, among other things, to produce low-cost computers with nontraditional power sources (such as a hand crank).

The OLPC made headlines recently by offering its laptops at less than $100 each. Worldreader, for now, is depending on its donors to subsidize the cost of the Kindles, meaning that the children of Ghana pay nothing for their new e-readers (except, of course, for the time spent learning how to use their fun new learning centers).

The first e-books on these Kindles are in English. The plan is to include texts in multiple languages in the not too distant future.