Literacy Bridge
Cliff Schmidt, along with Tricia and Jeff Raikes, Robbie Bach, and Bill and Melinda Gates, was a featured speaker at the Microsoft Alumni Foundation’s 2011 Integral Fellows Award Celebration. More than 500 Microsoft alumni and guests were in attendance to hear from Cliff about Literacy Bridge’s work this past year and why the Talking Book matters. Cliff received the Integral Fellows Award in 2010. The following is an excerpt from his speech.
Cliff walks to the stage with this song playing in the background.
Nice song, right? That was the “diarrhea song”.
The women who recorded it had fun with the song, but their words are quite serious: “diarrhea can kill your baby”. In fact, it’s the 2nd leading cause of child deaths worldwide.
Today, mothers in West Africa are playing this song and accessing dozens of other health messages and audio interviews where they are learning how to prevent diarrhea by washing their hands with soap, and how to treat dehydration with a mixture of sugar, salt, and water. If everyone had this knowledge, nearly 1 million lives could be saved each year. These mothers now have access to this knowledge and much, much more.
My organization, Literacy Bridge, is delivering this type of life-saving knowledge in a form that doesn’t require literacy. We work with local partners around the world to create compelling audio recordings, which we then load into this “library of spoken knowledge” – a device we call the Talking Book. People then use Talking Books to learn about and discuss these issues, and to record their own thoughts and feedback about the content. Our goal is to create the most cost-effective learning platform for the poorest people on earth so that they can improve their health and productivity.
And here’s what an improvement in productivity looks like: This subsistence farmer, Braole Felix, planted half of his corn crop with his traditional practices that he learned from his parents and grandparents. Here’s what that half looked like.
Then he planted the other half of his crop using what he learned from his Talking Book’s agriculture recordings of his crop.
The Talking Book that Felix is holding is powered by software. Taking a page from Bill Gates and Microsoft, we want our software to run on the best available hardware for the job. But there’s currently a real gap in affordable and usable hardware for people living on $1/day who want to learn, but can’t read and don’t have electricity. So we filled that gap with the Talking Book….
Thank you to Microsoft, the Alumni Foundation, and many of you in this room for the opportunity to respond to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s question ‘What are you going to do for others?” I truly hope there is a person or a cause that inspires you in the same way that Dr. King has moved me to do my part to help people in the most impoverished places on earth have access live-saving and life-changing knowledge.