A Global Learning Crisis - Using tablets to get one billion children reading

An evening with one of Elon Musk's Global Learning XPRIZE winners

• Mon 10th Feb 2020

There is a global crisis in education. One in six children is not able to read, write, or do maths. The impact of illiteracy on a child, their community and the global community is severe, affecting health, social mobility and economic stability. As communication and daily life becomes more reliant on literacy and digital literacy, these skills become even more crucial for children to become equipped to be lifelong learners, and future problem solvers. According to the UN, we need 24.4 million more primary school teachers in order to achieve Sustainable Development Goal 4 – quality education for all – by 2030.

Andrew will discuss how we – as a community of governments, NGOs, children, communities, teachers and parents – can do this, as well as the red herrings, archaic models and circumstantial barriers that risk preventing SDG4 from being achieved.

Viable solutions for global education are here, and we need to implement them.

Andrew Ashe, onebillion

Andrew Ashe is the co-founder and CEO of onebillion, a non-profit organisation that has developed onecourse – an app for children to learn to read, write and become numerate in their own language. onebillion has developed a dedicated learning device to deliver onecourse to the world’s most marginalised children. Following a 15-month field trial with out-of-school children in Tanzania, in which children using onecourse showed significant learning gains, onebillion was named joint winner of Elon Musk’s Global Learning XPRIZE.

Before onebillion, Andrew was a maths teacher and co-founder of language learning company EuroTalk Ltd.

Attending lectures