All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development
USAID and partners have launched a global competition, All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development, to find innovative solutions to advance children’s reading skills, particularly in low and lower-middle income countries. They invite organizations to submit proposals for awards of up to $300,000. Half of the awards are reserved for local organizations in identified countries.
Approximately 793 million people in the world are illiterate, two-thirds of them women. “Far too many children are spending years in primary school without successfully learning how to read – and we must change that,” says USAID Administrator Rajiv Shah.
With this challenge, USAID, AusAID, and WorldVision are offering $7.5 million in support of ground-breaking solutions that deliver scalable, cost-effective innovations to address two critical and unmet needs in low-resource contexts. These innovations should improve the quality of and access to teaching and learning materials for reading instruction in the lower primary grades, as well as innovations that enhance the quality and accessibility of education data for decision making focused on reading in the lower primary grades.
Applications are due Jan. 31, 2012. For more information, including application guidelines, visit www.AllChildrenReading.org.
Displaced students at an IRC-supported school in Kitshanga, North Kivu, DRC. Photo: Peter Biro
