Blog

In Summer 2013, Benetech Labs set out to create a platform that empowers water and sanitation community managers in Latin America to share best practices and improve their services, and that also enables institutional funders to evaluate investments in the water and sanitation sector. We’ve made excellent progress with this project and built a diagnostic tool to improve community-based water and sanitation providers’ capacity to provide water and sanitation services to their communities. I’m delighted to share that the Paraguayan government is now using our tool in a nationwide project that aims to advance access to clean water in the country. This is a major step forward in a collaborative effort to tackle the challenges that Latin American community water and sanitation organizations face.

The Skoll Foundation and the United Nations Foundation awarded Benetech a grant to bring written content to millions of people with visual impairments in India. This new grant will enable Benetech to scale up our Bookshare library services in India, where people with visual impairments face a severe dearth of accessible books in formats they can read. It supports a partnership between Benetech and the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to expand production and delivery of books in accessible formats in local Indian languages.

Last month, Benetech CEO, Jim Fruchterman, President Betsy Beaumon, and the Benetech Global Literacy team visited Washington, D.C., for briefings with senior leaders of the U.S. Department of Education. This included an “image slam”—a hands-on session in which they used our image description tool, Poet, to make digital images in a classic children’s book accessible. Since 2012, volunteers at image slams and other events have described nearly 45,000 digital images using Poet. This April, National Volunteer Month, we celebrate the wonderful volunteers who make a difference every day and help advance Benetech’s mission.

Rapid changes in the fields of consumer technology, education, and publishing make it possible to address the needs of the millions of people who face barriers of access to information. This includes individuals with print disabilities, such as those affected by learning differences, like dyslexia, or people with physical or visual disabilities. On the official blog of Disability.gov, Benetech President Betsy Beaumon writes about our Global Literacy Program and how it creates new and better opportunities for people with disabilities.

In a story titled “USAID Grant Helps Create Marathi Books for Blind Kids,” Indian newspaper India-West highlights Benetech’s winning project in USAID’s “All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development” literacy innovations competition.