Donations of Kindles to Africa

Recently, a non-profit organization called Worldreader started an initiative according to which Kindle devices were donated to the children of sub-Saharan schools of Africa.

Although the initial cost of these devices was higher compared to the text books, it is easier to add other books later and hence the learning experience becomes easier and efficient.

The organization has already donated about a thousand Kindle devices to school kids in Kenya, Uganda, and Ghana. These devices come pre-stocked with hundreds of eBooks.

These 100 books have a large variety of content including storybooks and “Easy English Learning for Junior High School” to Crime and Punishment.

Publishing partnership has also been established with Ghanaian and Kenyan publishers to make the availability of local books easier.

However a problem has emerged during this initiative and about 40.5 percent of the Kindles broke during the course of the pilot study of this project.

This rate has been called ‘unexpectedly high’ by Wordreader. But the organization certainly needed some kind of contingency plan to tackle with such a situation, considering that kids do not treat their belongings very delicately and the danger of a broken device is far more with kids compared to the adults.

43% of the population where this initiative had been undertaken had never used computer in their lives and the primacy source of income happens to be working on the farm.

Of course, children there were not aware of the best possible ways to keep the Kindle save, particularly when the 2 mm thick screen of Kindle is not considered very durable.

A far better strategy for the developing world happens to be One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) since laptops are much easier to repair compared to the tablets or eReaders.

Besides, the physical structure of the laptops is also more durable compared to the eReaders.

Kindle repair parts are not available widely so giving kids Kindle does not seem to be a very viable idea.

According to several representatives of the Amazon, the company does not even have the repairing facilities and when the screen of the device is broken or any other series damage takes place, Amazon simply replaces the device instead of repairing it.

While this is difficult for an average person in a developed country, it would be unimaginable for a teacher livingin a remote area of Ghana.

A better idea would be to ship these devices with detailed repair manuals. This way, the damaged devices would at least have some chance of being repaired.