Latest News Updates on our work in Ghana and around the world.

A report from the field by Literacy Bridge Country Director Andy Baylor

 The purpose of  our maternal and child health programme is to significantly decrease the number of preventable deaths through the Talking Book  with actionable, on-demand recordings from health experts and community leaders on safe birthing practices and steps to avert illnesses, like diarrhea, and malaria.

The programme seeks to improve the health of 24,000 pregnant women, mothers of neonatal children and mothers of children under the age of five in 75 low-literate communities across rural Ghana. The goal of this programme is to maximize the number of positive health behaviours adopted by making relevant health information readily available to them.

In July 2011, I introduced the programme to the officers in the Wa and Jirapa districts of the Ghana Health Service.  They were delighted to learn about it, and said that it was a program that would greatly complement their efforts in reaching out to rural communities.

In August, I worked with directors of Ghana Health Service in Lawra, Jirapa and Wa districts to determine the information that they wanted to convey to  help  pregnant women, mothers, and their families in order to effect  behaviour change. The directors  developed messages on five key topics: exclusive breastfeeding for the first six months after delivery, delivery with a skilled birth attendant, use of treated insecticides bed nets, hand washing with soap and oral rehydration therapy. The  messages were then recorded into the Talking Book  for use in the programme.

In September, the programme was officially launched.  I worked with Ghana Health Service in each district to produce a list of 40 communities based on the need of access to health information, availability of community health centers, and distance  to the nearest health facility. From those 40 communities, 20 would be randomly selected to receive the Talking Book program and 20 would be used as a control group.

We conducted formative research in four communities. We verified the population of the communities, whether the community had access to health information, and we documented the antenatal and postnatal activities of women in our target population. The formative research information was made available to the Wa and Jirapa district health officers necessitating some slight changes in messages. The formative research showed that the communities had similar low literacy levels and access to health information.  Also, during the same time we wanted to establish a baseline survey with which we could then measure the outcome of the maternal and child health programme.

In October, we began Phase I of the maternal and child health programme in two of the four formative research communities with lots of health messages created on the five key topics. The essence of Phase I was to learn as much as possible before expanding to the rest of the communities.

We have learnt so many things about the best methods of distributing Talking Books in a group setting so that the messages can heard by the  majority of the people. We have learnt so many things that could work very well and those that we need to be careful with in Phase II. For example we realised that we needed two people each from each group to be trained on the use of the Talking Book, and these two people should not be the leaders of the group because there were issues of conflict of interest. We also learnt so many other helpful things about groups that I know would be beneficial in Phase II.  The questions that women were asking indicated that the Talking Book was helping them learn things they previously did not feel could be harmful to their children or during their pregnancies.

The last time I was in Dapuaha, one of the formative research communities, I could hear children singing songs that were used as teaching messages in the Talking Books.  It was awesome!

participants at a user training session

In November, Fidelis and I began visiting the communities to familiarize ourselves with the locations, the communities , and to interact them. We also have plans to organize some youths in the communities to train in January as volunteers and community contacts.

Right now, we are continuing to learn as much as we can about these communities. We have also finished the baseline survey questions for Phase II, which will be reviewed by experts. Once we have the survey questions completed, we will be conducting surveys in all the communities. There is a lot of work to be done but the end results are saving the lives of women and their children.

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.

Thank you to the contingent of volunteers, including Microsoft employees, who volunteered at Literacy Bridge during United Way’s Day of Caring on September 18.  Literacy Bridge volunteer and supporter Mark Huck led the group in testing the Talking Book’s software and Audio Content Manager (ACM) features. Their work help ensure that the Talking Book works with ease and simplicity when in the hands of men, women and children living in some of the most inaccessible regions in the world.

Our gratitude goes to Frederick Akker, Joe Banks, Tatiana Fetisova, Jeremy Fried, Amruta Gulauikar, Carolyn Howsley, Brien Jacobsen, Olga Mathis, Preston Mathis (Microsoft Team Leader), Jonathan Palmer, Jonathan Poppe, Stacy Quan, Natalia Shul, and to our own Mark Huck for their invaluable help.

The Talking Book was featured in the Open Gadget Playtime at TransferSummit/UK 2011, Sept 7 – 8.  Member of the TransferSummit planning committee Steve Lee reported that the Talking Book received considerable attention from attendees. TransferSummit provides a forum for business executives and members of the academic and research community to discuss requirements, challenges, and opportunities in the use, development, licensing, and future of Open Source technology.

International Literacy Day on Thursday, September 8 was marked by a special celebration sponsored by the Global Partnership for Education (formerly known as EFA-FTI), Brookings Institution, and USAID.  Literacy Bridge’s Partnership Relations Manager Debbi Winsten participated in a series of presentations, which resulted in the Talking Book being called out for its innovative approach to advancing literacy in developing nations.   

Literacy Bridge was featured at the September 13 Global Health Resource Center Advisory Board meeting at the University of Washington (UW). Cliff Schmidt spoke to the board about the history of Literacy Bridge and its work in maternal and child health.

 Cliff Schmidt was a panelist for the Marketing and Sales for Early Stage Social Ventures session at the two-day interactive UW Invention to Venture Workshop (12V) on October 22.  UW students interested in social entrepreneurship heard from Cliff about the iterative work of Literacy Bridge in creating and developing the Talking Book, its value proposition, as well as the importance of developing strategic relationships, among other topics.  The workshop was organized by the UW Global Business Center, which holds the annual Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition.  For more information see GSEC

Volunteers from more than 20 countries throughout the world were tuned in for the first-ever Worldwide Volunteer Meeting webinar, September 24. Cliff Schmidt took meeting participants through the history of  Literacy Bridge and the evolution of its work.  They also heard showed them how they could participate in Literacy Bridge’s efforts.  See Literacy Bridge’s Volunteer page to become a volunteer.