Global Literacy & Accessibility Challenge request for proposals / 2018-07-25

USD 1 – 30.000

At Facebook, we strive to build communities across the globe and bring the world closer together. To do so, we need to reduce the barrier for everyone to participate, regardless of their backgrounds and abilities. Lack of literacy skills has been shown as one of the top challenges for people to adopt technologies and take part in the social communications online. Although, as a whole, we have made a lot of progress in education and literacy over the past 5 decades, as of 2014, there were still 758 million adults – two-thirds of which are women – lacking basic reading and writing skills. Facebook is pleased to invite the academic community to respond to this call for research proposals to better understand and address global literacy and accessibility issues.

Research awardees will be expected to contribute to the field of literacy and accessibility through qualitative or quantitative research, including, but not limited to:

–  Novel, scalable methods on assessing individual or population literacy levels.

– Understanding the experiences and challenges associated with literacy issues, eg learning disabilities or barriers due to English as a second language.

– Understanding the social, structural, and technology issues that prevent people from improving literacy skills.

– Understanding the impact of literacy skills on individuals and society.

– Digital, social technologies used to improve literacy level, especially, closing the gender gap in literacy rate.

– Design and development of technologies to elevate the literacy barrier, preferably with a focus on social and AI technologies.