Room to Read

Room to Read believes that World Change Starts with Educated Children. We envision a world in which all children can pursue a quality education that enables them to reach their full potential and contribute to their community and the world. Room to Read seeks to transform the lives of millions of children in developing countries by focusing on literacy and gender equality in education. Working in collaboration with local communities, partner organizations and governments, we develop literacy skills and a habit of reading among primary school children, and support girls to complete secondary school with the relevant life skills to succeed in school and beyond.

Room to Read envisions a world in which children can pursue a quality education that prepares them t

Goal One: Scale our reach to benefit at least 40 million children by 2025 and increase the number of girls benefited through our Girls’ Education Program and broader gender portfolio by 400%.

Goal Two: Enhance operational excellence and digital transformation, strengthening Room to Read’s operational infrastructure to significantly increase our reach and impact.

Goal Three: Influence system-level change in countries where we demonstrate comprehensive approaches and integrate program components at the national and subnational levels for long-term, sustainable impact.

To facilitate professional development, Room to Read recently established leadership groups consisting of senior leaders (Directors, VPs and Chiefs) around the world. These groups meet regularly for cross-departmental collaboration and team-building activities, as well as targeted individual coaching sessions and group coaching from external experts on topics such as formulating effective questions and answers; annual planning and budgeting; and diversity, equity and inclusion. Our Executive Leadership Team has led group sessions and participates actively in workshops. The new leadership development program has created improved understanding of goals across departments and geographies and has also provided a forum for a broad cross-section of leaders to weigh in on organizational challenges and opportunities.

The global pandemic created the greatest education emergency of our lifetimes, impacting the learning progression of 1.6 billion children. Room to Read took immediate action to ensure that education remains accessible, despite school closures throughout our program countries. We adapted our programs to provide human connectivity via the methods that are most accessible to the children we serve by providing: Literacy lessons and read-alouds of children’s books through radio and TV; Interactive Voice Response prompts and text messages with instruction for students and parents; Physical materials and parental guidance distribution for students at home without internet access; Risk and response tools to identify and offer support to girls at risk of dropping out; Distance mentoring and exam preparation for girls via telephone, SMS and video; Virtual trainings and professional development for teachers, authors and illustrators; COVID-related children’s books to support the social and emotional well-being. Room to Read staff partnered with government and school communities to reach children via no-tech, low-tech and high-tech channels. We updated research strategies and created new indicators for our emergency education interventions, supported by new remote data collection methods. We directed more funds toward large-scale partnerships based on the urgent needs of government systems. Our innovations enabled us to benefit 4.9 million children in 2020, which is twice the number of children reached in 2019. In 2020, our results led to more than 123 million households receiving literacy lessons through TV broadcast, and more than 31 million through radio broadcast. 18 million text messages were sent to teachers, students and families while more than 26,000 hours of virtual training and support were offered to educators, authors and illustrators. We distributed learning materials through any local infrastructure available, including by camel and boat.