SOCIAL INNOVATION
Interactive children’s books as a tool to connect rural communities around new and existing storytelling
Social Challenge:
The difficulty in accessing quality children´s books at an affordable cost within Colombian rural families.
Our target social challenge is the rural families´ lack of access to education and the poverty cycle they live in. Most people in rural communities are constantly in survival mode and comprise adults with basic or inexistent literacy levels. The Colombian government has been responsible for ensuring basic education over the past 30 years, but their efforts have not been enough to solve this problem and the poverty circle only increases.
This has created critical conditions where kids grow up with parents and grandparents who ignore and lack the appropriate books and tools to support their development, diminishing their access to opportunities.
Social solution:
Create seed book collections of home libraries, both in the city and in the rural areas, that inspire their readers to also create and share their own stories.
The creation of a publishing house with a social business model, where we create collections of high-quality children´s books, written and illustrated by recognized authors. The proposal is based on the solidarity concept of “one for one” -developed by TOM´s company-. A social business model that helps people in need through the products sold. This means that for every collection we sold, another one is donated to a family in a Colombian rural area, where adults and children participate in a creative workshop to activate their imagination and creativity to connect the reading experiences of the books with their personal stories.
Video presentation:
Video to show the launch of the collection at the Book Bogotá Fair 1st of May 2023:
Video to show our first reading pilot to validate the collection with children: