Prize competition seeks to promote love of reading

‘Enabling Writers’ prize competition seeks to create more books, authors and love of reading! 

World Book and Copyright Day (April 23) is a great time to celebrate authors, books and reading.

If you love reading, you probably fondly remember favourite books read to you as a child and how reading opens up a whole new world!

Sadly, 250 million children – many of them from disadvantaged backgrounds – are not learning basic literacy skills.[i]  Even those who learn to read in developing countries often find there are no fun and interesting books in their language or ones written at their level.

Which is why All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR GCD) is hosting Enabling Writers, a $100,000 global prize competition to incentivize the development of software solutions that allow writers to easily create and export decodable and leveled fiction and non-fiction readers in mother tongue languages to help early primary students (i.e., grades one to three) learn to read. Are you a solver that can create this type of innovation?  Do you know someone who can?

Applicants may submit their software applications until 13:00 EST, October 1, 2014.  Three innovators will be awarded $12,000 each and their software will be evaluated and tested in the field for these semi-finalists to compete for the $100,000 grand prize.  For competition details, visit https://www.omnicompete.com/enabling_writers.html. 

ACR GCD was established in 2011 as a partnership between USAID, World Vision and the Australian Government.  For information, visit AllChildrenReading.org or follow us at @ReadingGCD.