Global Digital Library

Major progress has been made towards increasing primary school enrolment rates. Still, 617 million children and adolescents worldwide are unable to read, despite most of them having attended school for several years. One reason for this is that many do not have access to quality early grade reading resources in a language they understand.

The goal of the Global Book Alliance is therefore to provide access to free, high-quality, early grade reading resources in languages that children use and understand. As a flagship activity within the Global Book Alliance, the Global Digital Library (GDL) has been developed to increase the availability of high-quality reading resources in underserved languages worldwide. “Underserved languages” refer to languages where there is currently a lack of quality early grade reading resources. “Reading resources” refer primarily to reading instruction books and storybooks for leisure reading, but the GDL will also link to some more interactive resources, such as literacy games.

The GDL collects existing high quality open educational reading resources, and makes them available on web, mobile and for print. Tye GDL currently offers resources in 43 languages, and by end 2020 the goal is to provide 100 languages. The platform also facilitates translation and localization of GDL-resources to more than 300 languages.