Leapfrog to Literacy – Part 1 of 2
Globally, 115 million school-age children do not attend school. An estimated 770 million people, roughly one-seventh of the world’s population, lack basic literacy. Two-thirds of these are women, which sets up a vicious cycle, since it is mainly women who teach young children.
These statistics could be reason enough for despair. Yet there are also new reasons for hope. Well-educated, highly motivated people are using the tools and capital of the developed world to help children in the developing world leapfrog to literacy. These people collaborate with equally talented and passionate people in the developing countries to create effective co-investment projects, linking the richest countries with the poorest.
One such person is former Microsoft marketing executive John Wood.
‘Come back with books’
Back in 1998, he took a vacation from his high-powered job to trek in Nepal. A product of an American upbringing, Wood was aghast at the lack of schools and scarcity of books in Nepal. Voicing his feelings to a local headmaster, Wood heard in reply a sentence that would change his life. “Perhaps, sir, you will someday come back with books.”
In his highly readable account, Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur’s Odyssey to Educate the World’s Children, Wood tells the story of his transformation from globe-trotting software executive to charity founder. His nonprofit organization, Room to Read, is one of the most effective organizations for educating children in the developing world. And it is growing at the speed of a Wall Street darling.
Putting an education to work
Like many fortunate Americans, Wood had the advantages of growing up in a family that valued education. Positive school experiences were reinforced with trips to his local public library in Athens, Pennsylvania. His bookish cradle left a lasting impression. “This love of reading, learning, and exploring new worlds so predominates my memory of youth that I simply could not imagine a childhood without books,” Wood writes in his book.
His formal education included an MBA from Northwestern’s Kellogg School, but by his account, Wood may have learned even more about business during his years at Microsoft—including the habit of focusing on business models that can be scaled up. Wood learned firsthand how a team of people with focused concentration, and quantitative measures ever in front of them, could achieve impressive growth.
He also read history and learned how business growth principles have been applied in charitable work. There was Andrew Carnegie, whom Wood describes as “my own personal hero,” because of the many libraries he built a century ago.
Closer to present times, Wood was inspired by former President Jimmy Carter’s campaign against guinea worm disease, which resulted in a decline from 900,000 cases worldwide in 1989, to fewer than 30,000 in 1995.
Further reading and interviews gave Wood an understanding of the magnitude of global illiteracy, and also of the pitfalls of some conventional charitable organizations. It wasn’t uncommon for a large portion of donations to be absorbed in administrative overhead, nor for tangible results to be at worst illusory, and at best hard to quantify.
Drawing on all these experiences—childhood memories, higher education, work, field observation and self-education—Wood started putting together a new model for getting results in literacy programs. The principles include:
- Simple to understand: Room to Read donations build schools, libraries and computer labs in countries that need them most, including Nepal, Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Sri Lanka, India and, most recently, South Africa and Zambia.
- Co-investment model: Like Andrew Carnegie’s library model, funds are approved only when local communities contribute land, labor and the means for ongoing support.
- Inexpensive: Despite the current economy, U.S. dollars still go a long way in the developing world. For a few thousand dollars, individual donors can fund a whole library or school.
- Focus on quantifiable results: Room to Read has built more than 5,100 libraries since the organization began in 2000.
- Low overhead: Administrative overhead is limited to 10%.
- Accountability: You can read Room to Read annual reports and its Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) reports on the organization’s website: www.roomtoread.org.
- Clarity of goals—Room to Read defines not only what it does but what it does not do. (More on this in Part 2 of this posting.)
Building upon this solid business foundation, Room to Read makes effective use of Microsoft-era marketing techniques, including email networking and online donations.
Wood has rightly received much attention, as journalists and foundations recognize that Room to Read’s represents something good going on in the world.
In Part 2 of this post, we’ll look at how Room to Read applies some best business practices to doing good in a sustainable way. But first, I want to hear from you.
Do you agree that as a highly literate, developed nation, Americans should support global literacy? How about here in the U.S., and in your community—are there literacy programs you know of that are particularly effective?