Zainab Chinikamwalla is the Head of Membership in Asia and Africa for Benetech’s Bookshare Initiative. She joined Benetech in the early days of Bookshare’s international expansion and has played an integral role in helping grow Bookshare’s impact in India and beyond. Read her story.
The coronavirus pandemic has set into motion unprecedented change in the education space, and our Bookshare initiative has risen to help address the number one challenge: how do we keep children learning when schools are closed? These numbers show the scale at which software can be used to build a more inclusive future, in this case by providing people with reading barriers with a means to read, learn, and access information in ways that work for them.
While schools are increasingly accommodating their students with reading barriers, the impact of not fully accommodating a student adds up. We estimate that US students are denied the opportunity to learn at least 180 million times each school year because they cannot read the required materials.
Today we are celebrating an exciting milestone for impact at Benetech: we have delivered 15 million books to people with reading barriers through the Bookshare online library service and network.
At the end of 2017, I shared Bookshare by the Numbers. Since then, our collection and membership has continued to grow and reach new milestones. We have added over 100,000 more members and delivered 2,000,000 more books. We’ve expanded to new countries and added new publisher partners, allowing Bookshare to reach more people with more […]
