Ellenore's Note
We started Open Hearts Big Dreams to “Empower Kids to Transform Their Future.” Our focus is on Ethiopia, K-12, and education however, we wanted to be different from many NGOs and run like a business. This is what we do and how we do it! We design to scale and include measures of success. We look for game changers to close important gaps like the lack of enough early reader books. We collaborate with organizations who build local capacity like Ethiopia Reads, Project Ethiopia, WEEMA, Lebawi, Seeds of Africa and MMRTI. We share stories of impact to show what is possible and to inspire involvement and collaboration.
Our first big project is Ready Set Go Books designed to increase the literacy rate in Ethiopia through creating 200 unique early reader books in the top three languages, Amharic, Tigrinya, and Afaan Oromo in the next 3-5 years. We are both proud and excited to have published 29 books on Amazon.com so far. Ethiopia Reads received the Ministry of Education’s sign off on our Amharic books and will be printing and distributing 50k Amharic books in the coming months. We are also working on 2 innovative incubator programs including the OHBD funded Lebawi Girls 16-week Coding Camp, which just kicked off, and the Transition Scholarship program with Project Ethiopia.
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