Learning Equality

"Learning Equality is not abstract. It shows up in a classroom in Pakistan where a deaf child is using their hands to tell you that it really matters." That's Sumaira Mian, Director of Philanthropy at Learning Equality. Sumaira's job is to bring in the resources that make everything else possible. And in 2025, visiting Deaf Reach schools in Pakistan, she found herself watching students sign along with Kolibri in a classroom, in a country where access to education is far from guaranteed. Watch to hear her story. ▶️ Fourth in a four-part series featuring some of the people behind our work. #LearningEquality #TeamSpotlight #EdTech #Kolibri #DigitalLearning #EducationForAll #GlobalEducation #InclusiveEducation #DeafEducation

"All this time I was sitting in my house in India, staring at a screen, hoping this work was impacting learners — but when you see it in person, you just realize." That's Revanth Voothaluru, Director of Global Implementations at Learning Equality. A few years in, Revanth traveled 45 minutes down a muddy road to a school with no internet in a refugee settlement in Kyaka II, Uganda — What he saw in that classroom stayed with him. Watch to hear his story. ▶️ Third in a four-part series featuring some of the people behind our work. More to come. 🎬 #TeamSpotlight #EdTech #Kolibri #DigitalLearning #EducationForAll #GlobalEducation #RefugeeEducation

What does a true partnership look like? Not the kind declared in an MOU, but the kind that allows everyone involved to grow together. Our Co-Executive Director Lauren Lichtman, Director of Global Implementations Revanth Voothaluru, and James Gihoma, founder of YIDA Youth Initiative, sat down with Nora Marketos, founder of PurposePhil Career to talk honestly about what building that kind of partnership actually takes. It covers what it actually takes to build a learning partnership between a US-based organization and a refugee-led organization in western Uganda from the things that look good on paper to the ones that matter more: sending a voice note instead of an email, changing a visit agenda to sit with teachers, finding a way to buy chairs for kids who needed somewhere to sit. "Learning Equality said: we are here to support you, tell us what you want to do. That simple act… gave us enough confidence to actually lead." — James Gihoma, YIDA Youth Initiative That confidence showed up in the numbers: children in Kyaka-II went from 44% to 87% in numeracy, and 13% to 71% in literacy. Real kids, in a real school, with teachers who now have the skills. Thank you, Nora, for holding this conversation so thoughtfully. Read the full article: https://lnkd.in/gShjb7u4 #RefugeeEducation #LocalLeadership #EdTech #PurposePhil #partnership

"Being there when that shift happens — when the light bulb goes off — is incredibly motivating for me." That's Laura Danforth, Director of Community & Product Operations at Learning Equality. Laura works directly with trainers and program leaders around the world to make sure teachers feel confident and set up for success with Kolibri. Watch to hear her story. ▶️ Second in a four-part series featuring some of the people behind our work. More to come. 🎬 #LearningEquality #TeamSpotlight #EdTech #Kolibri #DigitalLearning #TeacherTraining #EducationForAll #GlobalEducation

"Do I code just to make rich people richer — or do I code to help other people?" That was Alex's question. Learning Equality became his answer. Meet Alex Velez, Senior Full Stack Engineer and one of the people making offline education possible for kids around the world. 🌍 Alex joined us in 2022 as a Google Summer of Code contributor — watch to hear his story. First in a four-part series featuring some of the people behind our work. More to come. 🎬 #LearningEquality #TeamSpotlight #EdTech #Kolibri #DigitalLearning #CodeForGood #OpenSource #TechForGood #EducationForAll #OfflineLearning #GlobalEducation #SoftwareEngineering #GSoC #GoogleSummerOfCode

What if two business mentors could train entrepreneurs in 60 villages at the exact same time? That's what Village Enterprise is doing in rural Africa through their SPRINT program, and it's working. SPRINT uses Kolibri, Learning Equality's open source digital learning platform, to transform how frontline staff deliver training. Before SPRINT, a business mentor could support around 60–90 businesses a year. Now that same mentor can reach 600. No reliable internet needed. Breastfeeding mothers who miss a session can replay it on the community tablet. The results? One cohort saw 93% of participants graduate above the poverty line. Across the program, Village Enterprise has reached up to 10 times more first-time entrepreneurs than their traditional model. This is what it looks like when technology meets community on their own terms. 🎬 Watch the video to hear directly from the Village Enterprise team. Video footage: Jjumba Martin for Village Enterprise #Kolibri #VillageEnterprise #EdTech #EndExtremePoverty #SocialEnterprise #DigitalLearning

A new version of Kolibri Studio is here 🎉 This release introduces two major improvements designed to make content creation and collaboration easier across the Kolibri community: 🌍 Easy Sharing of Community Channels Channel editors can now submit channels to share with the broader community, complete with country, language, and subject metadata, plus a built-in license audit workflow to help ensure resources are openly shareable. ✍️ A completely overhauled question editor Editors can now format text with headings, lists, bold, italics, formulas, images, links, and much more, with significantly improved copy/paste support from tools like Microsoft Word. One of the most exciting parts of this release is that nearly half of it was authored by open source community contributors 💛 Huge shoutout to our 2025 GSoC contributors Habiba Ayman and Jakub Komárek for leading implementation of the headline features, alongside many other open source contributors who helped advance major improvements including migration work for the Kolibri Design System. These improvements also lay important groundwork for future assessment editing support. Read the full release notes here: https://lnkd.in/gFVW7pgS #OpenSource #EdTech #Kolibri #DigitalPublicGoods #GlobalEducation #GSoC

“Whose freedom is today's AI serving...when a third of the world’s population still has no internet access?... If you are not on the internet, you do not exist to those models.” This powerful talk from Kate Kallot, Founder and CEO of Amini, at the 2026 Skoll World Forum captures something we think about often at Learning Equality: who gets to shape the future of AI, and who gets left out of it? As AI systems are increasingly trained on online behavior, languages, and cultures, entire communities risk being excluded from the systems shaping the future. Our work has always focused on supporting learning in offline and low-connectivity environments because access still matters deeply. But inclusive AI cannot only mean access to technology and AI tools. It also means participation in the data, languages, contexts, and decisions that shape them. That’s why conversations about equity, representation, and data sovereignty matter so much, especially for learners and educators too often left out of technological and economic progress. An important watch from the Skoll Foundation. #AIforGood #DigitalInclusion #GlobalEducation #AIEquity #ResponsibleAI #DataSovereignty #SkollWF

We're proud to welcome this year's Google Summer of Code contributors to Learning Equality. This is our 6th consecutive year as a #GSoC mentor organization, and we couldn’t be more thrilled. This summer, three talented developers will be working alongside our mentors to build features that make our tools better for millions of learners around the world: ✔️ Habiba Ayman -> learner-facing QTI interactions for Kolibri  ✔️ Prashant Thakur-> accessible multi-select dropdown component   ✔️ Abhishek Punhani ->  editing of QTI question types in Kolibri Studio This program is about coming together for a greater good. Every contributor who joins adds something that outlasts the summer. To our mentors Jacob Pierce, Liana H., Alex Velez and Prathamesh Desai, thank you for showing up for the next generation of open source contributors. A special note: these proposals were deeply researched and thought out, not copied from AI output. That matters to us. Welcome to the team, class of 2026! 💛 #GSoC2026 #OpenSource #EdTech #KolibriFly

“When the internet behaves like weather, the product has to behave more like a shelter than a pipeline.” In this thoughtful reflection, our Senior Product Designer Tomiwa Ogunmodede explores how living between Lagos and Dubai reshaped his understanding of infrastructure, and what it really means to design for the way most of the world experiences connectivity. It’s a powerful reminder that building for global access isn’t just about reach. It’s about reliability, resilience, and designing for the realities educators and learners navigate every day. At Learning Equality, this is the thinking behind Kolibri: tools that keep working, even when the connection doesn’t. If you’re working in edtech, AI, or global development, this perspective is well worth your time: 👉 https://lnkd.in/g9VRrnrA #EdTech #DigitalInclusion #GlobalEducation #TechForGood #DigitalDivide