ARM & UNICEF to deliver health education in Ghana

Literacy Bridge’s partnership with UNICEF and ARM is focused around delivering life-saving maternal and child health information in Ghana’s most remote villages. The project will utilise Talking Book mobile devices to serve around 40,000 people immediately, with an ambition to double that reach within a year. Talking Books were developed in 2007 by Literacy Bridge to give people without literacy skills access to audio recordings of interviews, songs, and dramas that address life-saving health and agriculture advice.

This critical collaboration will expand Literacy Bridge’s Health Behavior Change Program to help approximately 50 of Ghana’s poorest communities. The team will assess the project’s impact on several behaviour change objectives, including, ebola and cholera prevention and treatment options; treatment of diarrhea in children using Oral Rehydration Therapy and breastfeeding for the first six months of life.

ARM and UNICEF are providing most of the financial support for this $750,000 project. ARM, an existing supporter, is also collaborating with Literacy Bridge to reduce technology costs and further improve the energy efficiency of the Talking Books as they utilise ARM processor technology.

“Literacy Bridge’s Talking Book Program is an innovative use of low-cost, mobile technology to influence critical behaviors that impact the lives and opportunities of the most vulnerable and excluded children,” commented Susan Namondo Ngongi, Ghana Country Representative, UNICEF. “We are pleased to partner on the Behavior Change Program because of its potential to immediately help tens of thousands of people who are the most difficult to reach due to illiteracy, lack of electricity, and geographic isolation.”

“Literacy Bridge set out to design a mobile platform that took account of the challenges often found in the developing world including the availability of power,” commented Dominic Vergine, Director of Sustainability and Corporate Responsibility, ARM. “The focus was on delivering quality local language education in the most energy-efficient way. Repurposing existing technology wasn’t a viable option but Literacy Bridge’s approach with the Talking Books is succeeding and early trials of the technology have shown huge potential for both philanthropic and business benefit.”

“This expansion is an important step in testing the scale of our programme. With UNICEF’s leadership in the issues that affect the lives of children, and with ARM’s leadership in using technology to create a better world, we couldn’t have a better pair of partners as we look towards reaching millions of children in the coming years,” commented Cliff Schmidt, Founder and Executive Director, Literacy Bridge.