Naaybox: Mobile Library For Rural Areas
Naaybox intends to promote reading and spread the love for books in rural areas of Mexico where, unfortunately, there is a lack of infrastructure for schools and public libraries. To bridge this gap, Naaybox combines tablets, digital books, and itinerant vans that travel across rural regions to encourage children and their parents to engage in reading activities and creative workshops.
The Challenge
Books are promoters of social and community development. However, in Latin-American countries, where the majority of the population lives in poverty, access to public libraries and cultural services is limited, particularly in marginalized communities. Public libraries offer not only books, but also cultural spaces to engage with knowledge, technology tools, and the broader world of information. And ultimately, connect us with our communities and ourselves. But building and maintaining a library can be costly. Thus, to promote early literacy in marginalized communities, Manuvo devised an alternative to traditional libraries: a box of dreams.
Introducing Naaybox
Naaybox intends to promote reading and spread the love for books in rural areas of Mexico where, unfortunately, there is a lack of infrastructure for schools and public libraries. To bridge this gap, Naaybox combines tablets, digital books, and itinerant vans that travel across rural regions to encourage children and their parents to engage in reading activities and creative workshops.
This initiative provides a cheaper alternative to traditional brick-and-mortar libraries while addressing pressing social issues in Latin America: dissemination of knowledge, promotion of values, preservation of traditions, development of creativity, appreciation of the arts, popularization of science, and social inclusion of vulnerable groups.
The box: physical space and equipment
Naaybox is a modular container designed to be multifunctional and easily transportable. This space can be used as a forum for workshops and storytelling, and adapt for private reading sessions, or as a showroom for children’s work. Naaybox is equipped with a touch screen computer, tablets, RFID wristbands, speakers and network administrator.
Digital content: storybook apps
Naaybox fosters early literacy through interactive storybook apps and reading workshops. Naaybox’s digital catalog includes topics in literature, history, science, art, and entertainment from some of the most highly regarded book publishers in Latin America.
Literacy and creativity workshops
Naaybox features workshops and family activities on the development of early literacy, encouraging co-reading and co-viewing, strengthening oral tradition, and discovering digital skills.
Digital books provide an opportunity to reach new, previously inaccessible audiences, and to help children in rural areas develop vital literacy skills for the future. Technology, as a tool for inclusion, can benefit marginalized communities if we make the effort to see the world from their perspective.