FLAGSHIP ACTIVITIES
Imagine classrooms in West Africa with shelves filled with reading books in local languages ranging from Bambara to Fulfulde.
Best practices improve the book chain as they are adopted independently – perhaps with the aid of technical assistance and know-how – by institutions around the world. But there are some improvements to the book chain that can be produced only by concerted collaboration and pooled resources. The Alliance will launch flagship initiatives to seize those opportunities.
The Alliance expects to launch flagship initiatives each year. Ideally, an initiative should have three characteristics.
It delivers substantial improvements only possible through collaboration and pooled resources by donor institutions, private sector actors, and national governments.
It rallies new allies, inspiring action and commitment, contributing not only to the Alliance’s goals but also increasing the Alliance’s momentum.
It is based on programs and interventions that have proven successful and would benefit from greater scale.
2018 FLAGSHIPS
These flagship initiatives are designed to build momentum for the Alliance’s work in the years ahead.
The Alliance will increase access by promoting open licensing and online access to books via the GDL. The idea for the GDL originated with All Children Reading: Grand Challenge for Development and is now led by Norad with support from a broad advisory group. The GDL will provide a repository for high-quality open-source reading resources that are available on the web, mobile devices, and for print by local publishers.
The GDL-project is currently collecting reading resources and piloting the technical platform. The platform is expected to launch before April 2018.
A dearth of storybooks in neglected languages makes it impossible to provide appropriate books to millions of children around the world. To achieve scale quickly, the Alliance will support publishers in low-resource settings to identify and create high-quality titles, building local publishing markets.
Publishing Collaboratives will support local publishers as the cornerstone for local book development, creating the culturally appropriate titles that will populate classrooms.
The Global Book Campaign will help accelerate replication of promising activities (e.g., digital title development, easy-to-use authoring tools, and crowd-sourcing translations) and catalyze new efforts for local language material development.
For example, the All Children Reading Grand Challenge for Development (ACR:GCD) partners will continue to advance technology-based platforms and models for local language material development and access, applying their success in competition-sourced and technology-leveraged innovations to a new set of activities focused on early grade local language efforts.