Photo by Cayce Clifford

David Risher (MBA 1991) was on a family trip to Ecuador in the spring of 2009, volunteering and touring a local orphanage in Guayaquil, when he noticed a padlock on a nearby building. It turned out it was the local library—and no one was particularly keen on using it. The books, his guide said, came by boat, were often well out of date, and were seemingly of little interest to the children. “I started reflecting on my own childhood, of going to the library and bringing home a stack of books,” recalls Risher. “We didn’t have a lot growing up but that was something we could do.” Risher wanted these children to have the same opportunity.

Risher had been an executive at Amazon and Microsoft, so he certainly knew plenty about tech and business. He also had connections, such as Steve Kessel, longtime head of Kindle, who heard the story of the abandoned library and donated 20 Kindles for the launch of Risher’s nonprofit, Worldreader, an organization that uses technology to reach children all over the world through its foundational app.

Within months, Worldreader’s app launched, offering access to thousands of books from around the world, allowing students to read not only for pleasure but also to develop reading, language, and comprehension skills. The data the organization collects—e.g., what’s interesting to young readers and how they access those books—is then shared with its partner organizations and publishers, to tap into and strengthen new global markets of readers.

Worldreader was quickly a success story in the global south, amassing more than 2 million users in just five years. Global figures continued to climb but, in the spring of 2020, when schools across the United States were closed due to the pandemic, the organization turned its attention homeward as disparity issues across the nation were laid bare. “We’ve brought all of the tools we’ve built to underserved communities right here in our own backyards,” observes Risher.

Thus far, Worldreader has reached 19 million readers in 48 countries. The organization also can boast that those readers have engaged with nearly 68 million books. It’s a massive international library without a padlock in sight.

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