Around the world, educators and learners face a wide range of challenges when it comes to accessing quality learning opportunities – from limited connectivity to a lack of adaptable learning resources. In this 5 Questions interview, Lauren Lichtman, Co-Executive Director of Learning Equality, discusses how Kolibri, the organization’s free, open-source, offline-first learning platform, is supporting educators and learners in communities where internet access is limited or unreliable.
What do you do?
I’m one of the Co-Executive Directors of Learning Equality, a nonprofit that builds free, open-source, offline-first learning tools, drawing on openly licensed content. We started in 2013, when a group of students brought Khan Academy videos and exercises to classrooms with no internet connection, proof that technology could meaningfully support learning without one. Today, our tools reach 13+ million learners and teachers across 220+ countries and territories, from refugee settlements in Uganda to government school systems in the Philippines to rural classrooms with no reliable power grid globally. My role spans partnerships, fundraising, finance, and strategy. I build relationships for sustainability and strengthen the organization so that we can continue our mission: expanding access to a quality education for people the internet was never built to reach.
What ties our work together is a simple bet — access to quality education shouldn’t depend on a fast internet connection. We think about connectivity as a spectrum, not a binary, and we design for teachers and learners at every point along it. Access alone isn’t the goal; we’re focused on the quality of learning technology can enable and support, not just whether a device with content is available.
Why is this work important?
Access to a quality education is a universal right. It shouldn’t depend on where the infrastructure happens to reach. Technology can be one of the strongest levers for closing that gap if it’s built for equity from the start, not retrofitted onto it. We know this because we’ve built and tested it; offline, in classrooms that never had a reliable connection to begin with. Because our tools run fully offline and the content is curated, our design mitigates many of the risks driving current concern about ed-tech: uncontrolled internet access, unvetted content, and data privacy.
That also means we do something most organizations in this space can’t. Because our tools are free, don’t require our direct involvement for use, and are built to be adapted and contextualized by communities using them, organizations everywhere use them as the ed tech layer of programs they run themselves: refugee education nonprofits, U.S. state prison education systems, adult literacy programs, and UN agencies. Without that infrastructure, most couldn’t build or deploy ed tech like it on their own.
What’s been the biggest surprise so far?
Because our model includes free, adaptable software and the supporting materials needed for do-it-yourself implementation, we designed it with the expectation that educators and organizations would use it in a variety of ways. But hearing the stories of how diverse organizations and individuals have adopted and adapted our tools still catches me every time. For example, Akshar Foundation runs a school in Assam, India, where many of its students had been working in mines, quarries, and factories, some as young as ten. Tuition there is paid in plastic waste instead of money. Incredibly, Akshar discovered Kolibri on their own. They built their own app on top of Kolibri to place each child at the grade level their skills actually support. Within the first two months of class, their students’ language and math outcomes improved. We had no idea any of this was happening until their team reached out to share about their success.
The surprise is that we didn’t know this organization or its work, but it reinforces what’s made possible through our model. We didn’t build solely for this specific context and use case, but Akshar is an example of how we know our adaptable technology works.
Where do you see your work in five years?
People have been telling us since 2012 that universal connectivity is only a few years away and will make offline-first tools less necessary. It hasn’t arrived, and even where it has, connectivity alone doesn’t produce better teaching. So in five years, I still expect us to be designing across the spectrum of connectivity, and to still be a leader in offline-first ed tech.
What we want more of, alongside that, is local leadership — both within our own organization and among those adopting our tools. Our current organizational strategy aims to support governments in moving toward tech-enabled, student-centered learning: more agency, more choice, more room for a learner’s own reasoning. Our role is to make that possible at the level of design: building low-resource software, shared infrastructure, and evidence that local educators and ministries can put to use in classrooms they know and understand. Five years from now, I want Learning Equality to be known not just for the reach of our tools, but for their impact on governments and educators who took student-centered learning further than we could have taken it ourselves.
What else should people know?
No single kind of organization can solve the educational equity gap. Governments set policy and scale. Local implementers know their communities. Nonprofits like ours build shared infrastructure, as open, offline and adaptable technology can be an enabler and a field builder. Those are different jobs, and the field needs organizations willing to come together for maximum scale and impact, rather than going solo, duplicating work, and ultimately competing to own teachers and learners.
Open source is central to playing that role well, and it’s chronically underfunded relative to what it does. It gets treated as a free public good instead of infrastructure that needs sustained investment in the same way a road or a power grid does. Every organization doing field-building work, ours included, needs funders willing to support that infrastructure directly –– not just the visible, fundable programs sitting on top of it.
That’s the shift I want to see in how funders and organizations like ours work together: less a model where money comes with a fixed set of expectations attached, more a true partnership, where funders and organizations are building something together and each side is doing the part they’re positioned to do.
