Hear from organizations with a Gold Certification!

Worldreader

Watch this 10-minute video to hear Rebecca Chandler Leege, CEO of Worldreader, explain Worldreader‘ s research and how it led to their first certifications with EduEvidence.

Main Takeaways:

  • Rebecca Chandler Leege highlights that the education sector often underinvests in families. Her organization, Worldreader, aims to empower parents as the primary influencers in a child’s early years to ensure they are school-ready. A key goal is understanding how to encourage parents to read more frequently and for longer periods through coaching tips and a user-friendly interface.

  • In July 2024, they made a strategic decision to invest heavily in early childhood development, retooling their technology to better support parents and caregivers reading to children from birth. Their re-launched platform, BookSmart, reached over 440,000 families in 2024 across over one hundred countries, with major readership in Kenya, Ghana, and South Africa.

  • The platform prioritizes a mobile-first, digital-first experience to meet the needs of “digital native” families, offering a curated collection of approximately 2,700 titles across five languages. They are developing original content, such as the Kooky Kitty series, and exploring television episodes to complement the digital reading experience.

  • As a nonprofit, Worldreader provides its content free of charge with no paywalls, relying on philanthropic support to keep data-heavy tools accessible. In Kenya, they have partnered with M-Pesa to integrate BookSmart into a platform families already use for banking, essentially putting a “family library” in their pocket. Their tool is available via Android, iOS, and as a Progressive Web App (PWA).

  • ICEI’s report stated: “Based on the intervention results, the BookSmart app demonstrates considerable promise in enhancing both socio-emotional and emergent literacy skills among children in Kenya”. As a result, EduEvidence has awarded them a Silver EFFECTIVENESS Certification as well as a Gold EQUITY Certification, which have helped the organization refine its approach to behavioral change and long-term reader retention.

Access Agriculture

Watch this 11-minute video to hear Savitri Mohapatra, from Access Agriculture, explain their research and how they achieved their certification from EduEvidence.

Main Takeaways:

  • Access Agriculture was founded in 2012 as an outcome of research commissioned by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) and the Global Forum for Rural Advisory Services (GFRAS). The research revealed a real demand for quality audiovisual learning materials to help rural communities so that they can cope with the many challenges that they faced, all of which required more resilient, diverse, healthy and fair food systems, facilitated by inclusive education and extension methods.

  • This is why Access Agriculture works to empower these underserved rural communities, by building lasting capacity for enabling the co-creation and sharing of agroecological knowledge. With over 6,000 videos in more than 100 local languages on their platform, they have managed to combine scientific knowledge with traditional local wisdom by farmers.

  • They have launched an AI-powered multilingual search tool, to make their wealth of knowledge more accesible – this way, users don’t need to know specific jargon to find what they are looking for, since they can use conversational language in their searches. Additionally, they offer a mobile app for non-facilitated training, designed to consume minimal bandwith and storage.

  • Access Agriculture’s last-mile delivery model involves empowering young rural changemakers, called Entrepeneurs for Rural Access (ERAs). ERAs are identified and equipped with a solar-powered smart projector which provides access to their entire video library, and then coached to make a business from bringing the videos to farmers through facilitation.

  • With 1.5 million users in their online video platform, including 5,000 organizations and over 200 educational institutions, plus their behaviour change campaigns through mass media, it it estimated that Access Agriculture has reached over 90 million people. Many peer-reviewed research articles showcase their impact in terms of reduction of pesticide use, adoption of green techonologies, increasing the yield of crops, empowering women’s economies, and engaging with village savings and loans associations.

  • Savitri Mohapatra explains the three-month process of research that led to their certification from EduEvidence: in Stage 1, they provided all available evidence to researchers from the International Centre for EdTech Impact (ICEI); in Stage 2, the researchers used the evidence and their Terms of Reference as a basis for strengthening their Theory of Change and develop a Logic Model; in Stage 3, ICEI identified gaps in evidence, formulated future research questions, and proposed appropriate evaluation methods.

  • Finally, ICEI’s report served as a basis for EduEvidence validators to confer Access Agriculture three certifications: Bronze EFFICACY, Silver EFFECTIVENESS, and Gold ENVIRONMENT. For this last category a shorter, separate list of questions and documentation had to be answered.

You can learn more about our certifications by clicking here.