To teach young children to read, teachers and students need textbooks, lesson plans, and reading materials that are aligned with each other and with the science of reading. Books should also be procured at reasonable costs, and delivered to every classroom before the start of the school year.
Most classrooms in low-income countries lack sufficient instructional resources, despite substantial investment in textbooks and other teaching and learning materials (TLM) over decades. One major cause of this continuing scarcity is that complex, costly, and opaque supply chains cause books to go missing or be delayed. Past attempts at developing distribution management solutions have been overly complex, too project-specific, and/or too expensive, making broad-scale adoption impossible.
Read@Home’s Track and Trace (R@HTnT) app is a revolutionary low-cost platform designed to bring transparency and efficiency to the TLM supply chain. Whether it’s a school textbook, teacher guide, book for
reading practice, or tablet, ensuring TLMs get from the production point and into students’ hands is crucial. The open-source app, funded by the World Bank’s Read@Home initiative, can ensure that every stakeholder
has real-time visibility into the journey of their TLMs and allow them to solve problems and correct issues that arise along the way.
This updated primer discusses challenges and issues faced by content creators, such as publishers, authors, illustrators, and teachers, all of whom have a stake in producing high-quality and cost-effective materials for education. This version includes lessons learned from the COVID-19 lockdowns, technology challenges that still impede access to digital content, and the tradeoffs between digital access and print.
La plupart des salles de classe des pays à faible revenu manquent de ressources pédagogiques, malgré les investissements substantiels dans les manuels scolaires et autres matériels d'enseignement et d'apprentissage sur plusieurs décennies.
This note outlines the World Bank’s Read@Home initiative’s recommendations for a “first collection” of children’s
literature. It is intended for Read@Home and other early reading programs involved in the development and/or
selection of books to support children’s pre-reading and early reading skills.