Research Reports

The LEAP “Libraries, E-reading, Activities and Partnership” pilot aimed to increase the availability of reading materials in Kenya’s libraries with the provision of e-readers filled with relevant books. This paper constitutes a final report for the yearlong LEAP pilot. The primary impacts of the program included an almost threefold increase in library visits, from 10,442 to 29,023 patrons per month, 254 library-initiated community events, and over 20,000 patrons trained on e-reader usage.

While UNESCO research indicates that hundreds of thousands of people in countries like Ethiopia, Nigeria and Pakistan are reading on mobile devices, very little is known about these readers. Drawing on findings from a year-long study, this report explains the habits, preferences and demographic profiles of mobile readers in seven developing countries.

Project LEAP—“Libraries, e-Reading, Activities and Partnership” is a groundbreaking pilot program implemented by Worldreader in partnership with eight public and community libraries in Western Kenya, and funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. LEAP aims to increase the availability of reading materials in Kenya’s libraries with the provision of e-readers filled with relevant books.
 

The iREAD Ghana Study 2012-2014 set out to tackle the lack of reading materials and low levels of literacy among Ghana’s early primary school students. The intervention addressed these issues with the provision of relevant (culturally and age appropriate) reading materials via e-readers, the implementation of effective teaching practices, and activity-based learning opportunities. The program, which ran from January 2013 - July 2014, served 574 students from Primary 1, 2, and 3 grades in four under-resourced schools in Ayensuano and Suhum Districts in the Eastern Region of Ghana.

This report takes a critical overview of the effectiveness of ICT policies and strategies in basic education in Central and West Asia. It presents individual country studies looking at Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, the Kyrgyz Republic, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan (participating countries), with shorter studies in Afghanistan, Armenia, Georgia, and Pakistan.

This report provides a comparative analysis of ICT integration in five Arab States (Egypt, Jordan, Oman, Palestine and Qatar) by looking at four specific types of data: i) use of ICT in policy and key
curricular areas; ii) ICT infrastructure to support the integration of ICT in educational institutions; iii) participation in programmes offering ICT; and iv) teacher’s use of and training on how to use and teach ICT in the classroom.

This publication examines the status of ICT in Education in eight Southeast Asian countries, namely Cambodia, Indonesia, Lao PDR, Malaysia, Myanmar, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam. The study focuses on these countries’ ICT in Education policies and programmes, infrastructure, official development assistance (ODA) status, and readiness for new and advanced learning technologies (such as learning with robots).

This paper provides a short summary of some related approaches and projects on the use of technology in education in poor, rural and isolated communities and includes copious links to related posts that have appeared on the World Bank's EduTech blog.

A collection of EduTech posts, assembled and re-purposed to enable off-line reading in one consolidated PDF document. The emerging relevance and use of mobile phones in the education sector continued to be a regular area of discussion, as were efforts to collect data to help us understand what is actually happening around the world related to technology use in education, with a specific interest in circumstances and contexts found in middle and low income 'developing' countries.

A collection of EduTech posts, assembled and re-purposed to enable off-line reading in one consolidated PDF document. This collection of EduTech posts explore issues related to the use of information and communication technologies to benefit education in developing countries.