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In 1440, the Gutenberg Printing Press made for the first time ever possible
for mass distribution of the printed word and the whole world changed.
Suddenly, science flourished, civic participation blossomed.
We know what access can mean so now we need Gutenberg 2.0.
Illiteracy doesn’t just affect education. It affects everything.
What we know, you can see from these figures,
it affects personal annual income, it affects hunger, it affects poverty,
it affects health care, drug use, crime.
It also is central to economic development.
You can see here UNESCO’s figures relating to the human development index.
The highest 30 countries show illiteracy rate of over 96 percent
and the lowest 30 countries are struggling with illiteracy rates
of just over 50 percent.
Now, there has been a global call for educational parody
but we’ve ignored one of the central elements to reaching that goal
and that is access to books and educational resources.
You can see study after study as shown that this issue is central
to reaching our goal of education for all.
In the U.S. statistics are staggering.
This is one of the recent studies.
It shows that in the deepest areas of poverty
there’s one book or every 300 children.
But we shouldn’t be surprised what access means
because it means a lot in a lot of fields.
Microfinance is a great example.
In microfinance access to small loans has allowed
whole segments of the population to elevate themselves
above the poverty line in very sustainable ways for years.
This is a study out of Bangladesh that showed that 48 percent of the families
who had access to capital were able to sustain their living
above the poverty line for years.
And when traditional lenders were unable to get down to that basic pyramid,
microfinance stepped in.
The publishing industry is facing that same issue.
They are unable to reach down and reach the kids
who are waiting for them at the basic pyramid.
And that’s where First Book comes in.
For 17 years we’ve been running innovative programs
to allow those publishers to reach down to children
who are waiting for their products desperately.
We’ve got 68 million books, about ten million children,
and about 3000 communities in North America.
Our most recent innovation is called the First Book Marketplace.
It’s an online resource center that allows programs and schools
that are reaching the hardest to reach children
to access these resources at 50 to 90 percent below market value.
It also generates revenue to the parent organization.
And you can see what it’s done for our growth.
In 2002 we were reaching about 4700 organizations in the U.S.
and now, just this last year, we broke 21,000.
All revenues are up 65 percent with this project alone over the last year.
And the future is very bright.
We can reach millions more children with this strategy and our projections
in the coming years are an average growth rate of about 45 percent annually.
I have a moment of silence on this one.
The great news is, it really works for programs.
Over 99 percent of programs we reach, report that they expand
the educational programs they have for the kids they serve
or they expand the number of children they reach
through their existing programs.
And it also reaches the children in a wonderful way.
We run our own studies that show that interest in reading
when they get a steady diet of books more than doubles
and you can see on ten separate measures of academics
that there’s great elevation as well.
So we’re already reaching kids in the U.S. and in Canada.
We’ve reached in to Latin America and started some very important conversations
and now we’re starting conversations in Asia.
But we’re facing some real questions.
We’ve got IT questions.
We’re gonna need capital at the front end.
Country after country is coming to us
asking us to bring this model to their children.
So the question we need your help with today is who goes first?
Whose children come first?
How do we prioritize the countries who are coming to us?
Thanks.