Today our Digify and Live SA teams will be spending 67 minutes on Mandela Day writing stories for writing app bookly which aims to improve literacy in South Africa. According to the 2012 General Household Survey (GHS) conducted by Statistics South Africa over 7% of South Africans are illiterate.
Nelson Mandela International Day was launched in recognition of Nelson Mandela’s birthday on 18 July, 2009 via unanimous decision of the UN General Assembly. It was inspired by a call Nelson Mandela made a year earlier, for the next generation to take on the burden of leadership in addressing the world’s social injustices when he said that “it is in your hands now”.
Last year, digital agency NATIVE VML launched bookly, an e-reader app for Mxit that delivers smartphone functionality to even the most basic feature phone. With more than 450 local and international books on the platform, bookly became popular fast. There have been over 13 million pageviews from close to a million unique visitors since launch. With the notion that every phone is a book and with a phone, anyone can be an author, bookly’s new mobile site will invite users to tell their story and write a bookly.
“By expanding bookly into a writing platform, we will allow children and young adults to create content that is relevant to them – and written in their own language. That way, bookly will become a platform that inspires writing, in any language, on any mobile device,” says Levon Rivers, NATIVE VML’s Head of Inventions.
Read our crew’s bookly stories: Sarah, Mapholoba Boy, Nush and Tshepo.
Follow our 67 minutes on Twitter today @LivityAfrica @LiveMagSA #DigifyZA.
