World Librarians is a socio-technical system invented through a collaboration between ShiftIT in Malawi and a team of students, faculty, and staff at UMass Amherst. World Librarians provides educational content to schools and libraries in Malawi and Kenya.
These schools have no real library and have no access to the Internet, causing the children and library patrons to have very limited information to support their learning. In collaboration with ShiftIT in Malawi and Net Bila Net in Kenya, we are successfully supporting over 20 schools in Malawi and have a startup in Dandora, a slum in Nairobi, Kenya. And we want to expand to many other schools, libraries, and even offline rural health centers. We also have new start-ups being established in Cameroon, Ghana, and possibly Haiti.
How does it all work?
The schools and libraries we support have established some access to computer labs and a workable offline Wi-Fi router system called the RACHEL (learn more about the RACHEL device here). The UMass World Librarians team is charged with searching for digital educational content on topics that teachers and students request. Once uploaded, we rely on the teachers at these schools in the Global South to download the content for use in classrooms and computer labs, using their personal cell data plans, which is very expensive for them.
How would your donation be used?
The key hurdle in this workflow is providing the technology used at the schools and libraries (solar power, laptops or tablets, and the RACHEL devices) as well as the funding needed to cover the downloading costs by the couriers using their personal cellular data plan (what we call “digital postage”). Using an app called World Remit, we can pay for the data used by the courier in downloading what we send through a simple and small credit-card payment.
- $20 will allow us to cover the data plan costs for a teacher in Malawi or Kenya to download digital material we send over two weeks time.
- $50 will be enough to allow our partners in Malawi or Kenya to purchase multiple tablets for students to use to access the RACHEL device and the information we send that resides on it.
- Five donations of $100 will allow another classroom to have a new RACHEL device.
- $250 will support one of the staff working with our partner organizations ShiftIT Malawi or Net Bila Net in Kenya to work with a school over several months.
