Beyond Borders: The Global Literacy Crisis We Can No Longer Ignore

Wings carry us further than fear—and so does literacy. If we can lift our arms, we can lift our voices. If we can lift our voices, we can lift communities. Across borders and continents, this is how the world rises. 🌍📚

Because Literacy Should Not Depend on Geography

For most of my career, my work has lived inside American schools—strengthening Tier 1 instruction, supporting teachers as they shift practice, building MTSS systems, coaching literacy leads, and helping districts align their work to the science of reading. My days are filled with planning PD sessions, modeling lessons, and ensuring that teachers have what they need so children can thrive- sometimes spending days opening curriculum boxes.

But last spring, something shifted.

At The Reading League Summit, I met Kris Nystrom, the Executive Director of Reading the World. Our conversation began like any other, but quickly turned into something deeper—teacher knowledge, global inequity, curriculum access, and the stark differences between where we work and where so many children around the world learn.

Something in that conversation sparked a realization I hadn’t fully seen before:

Here, we have so much; there, many have so little.

I have stood in rooms filled with brand-new books, untouched intervention kits, digital subscriptions, and shelves of instructional materials. Yet across the globe, millions of children learn without books, without trained teachers, without buildings, or without safe, consistent schooling.

Holding both worlds in your mind at once changes you. It demands something of you. Kris saw something in me—a recognition, a conviction—and invited me to join the work in Kenya. And for the first time in a long time, I felt called into a mission bigger than the walls of any one district.

Why Africa—and Why the World Must Care

When people hear that I’m going to Africa, the response often comes with a quiet pause and a set of questions that rarely get spoken aloud but are always felt: Why Africa? Haven’t we already helped enough? Isn’t it their responsibility now?

But the reality is far more layered—historical, global, and deeply human. Africa does not face educational challenges because of any deficit in intelligence, culture, talent, or resilience. The continent is rich in all of those. The challenges exist because of a history that Africa did not choose.

For centuries, external forces shaped—and in many ways disrupted—the continent’s path. Colonization, the transatlantic slave trade, and the extraction of land, labor, minerals, and knowledge left lasting fractures. Wealth and resources flowed outward to the Western world; instability, interrupted systems, and inequity remained. Education systems that might have flourished were instead underfunded, undervalued, or deliberately suppressed. And those ripple effects—structural rather than cultural—are still felt today.

This is not about guilt. This is about truth. And with truth comes responsibility.

The narrative that “Africa has been helped enough” is simply not accurate. The more honest statement is this: the world has taken far more than it has ever invested. And the global inequities we see today are not the result of African failure, but the legacy of global history.

Now, in a moment when we do know so much about effective reading instruction, brain-based learning, and evidence-based practices, withholding that knowledge would not be neutral—it would be inequitable.

Sharing is not saving. Sharing is not superiority. Sharing is returning, partnering, and acknowledging our interconnected past and present.

The teachers in Kenya do not need rescuing—they already possess dedication, skill, and a profound commitment to their students. What they deserve is access: access to training, materials, and instructional knowledge that educators in wealthier nations receive as a matter of course.

And the children in Kenya do not need pity. They need possibility. They need the same chance every child anywhere should have: the chance to learn to read, to build a future, to have doors open rather than closed by circumstance.

That is why Reading the World, in partnership with the Science of Reading Center at SUNY New Paltz, is working directly with Kenyan educators—to bring evidence-based early reading practices to teachers in rural villages, strengthen instructional knowledge, and support sustainable change grounded in respect, equity, and collaboration.

What We Will Be Doing

This February, I will travel to Kenya to support early literacy development through:

• professional development grounded in the science of reading

• lesson modeling and side-by-side coaching

• training in phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension

• support in building sustainable instructional routines

• resources and materials for teachers and classrooms

Our work is not a one-time visit. It is capacity building. It is partnership. It is planting seeds teachers can carry forward long after we leave.

Because when you train one teacher well, you change hundreds of lives. Train a community of teachers, and you change generations.

How You Can Help

As we move into a season of gratitude and giving, I invite you to consider supporting this work in a way that directly transforms classrooms and communities:

Your donation will support:

• literacy materials for students

• instructional resources for teachers

• ongoing teacher-led literacy initiatives

• sustainable, evidence-based practices that last beyond this trip

Donate Here:

No gift is too small:

• $5 provides a book

• $50 supports teacher training materials

• $500 strengthens literacy programming for an entire village

Every dollar becomes a book, a lesson, a classroom, a chance.

A Final Reflection

If you or I had been born into a different village, a different family, a different continent, or a different set of circumstances—we could have been the child without a book. The child eager to learn but without the materials to practice. The child walking miles to school because there is no transportation. We could have been the teacher with dedication but no access to training or resources. We could have been part of a school community doing the very best it can with what it has, even when what it has is painfully limited.

The difference between us and those children is not intelligence. Not potential. Not motivation.

The difference is geography. And geography should never determine a child’s future.

Where we were born shaped the opportunities placed in front of us. It shaped our access to books, trained teachers, curriculum, and well-resourced classrooms. It shaped the systems that supported our learning long before we ever knew they existed.

And when we recognize that, something shifts. Sharing resources—knowledge, training, materials—is not an act of charity. It is an act of solidarity. It is a recognition that opportunity should not be determined by latitude and longitude.

We now hold practices, tools, and instructional knowledge that can expand access for teachers and students globally. Keeping those resources within the borders of the most privileged countries does not create equity. Sharing them does.

Because to teach a child to read changes one life. But to equip a teacher—anywhere in the world—with tools and resources they have long deserved,

that strengthens entire classrooms, entire communities, entire generations.

This is why I go.

Not because children in Kenya are lacking—they are not.

Not because teachers there are incapable—they are deeply capable.

But because geography should not decide who has access to literacy, and because sharing what we have is the most human thing we can do.

This is why this work matters.

And this is why I ask, with humility and hope, for your support.

When we know better, we teach better! See you next Sunday!