One should always have the right to learn

Do you know how much being able to read is important? It seems normal for us, but think of it and you’ll understand how essential it is. Imagine you can’t read anything, especially you can’t read what is written on a medicine wrapping, you can’t read the instructions and the consequence is that you’ll certainly misuse the medicine. In Africa, many people are dying because of that incapacity. This is an example among many others, nonetheless all of them underlines that the lack of education only worsens the situation in developing countries. As being the first step to education, reading is also the first step to further development.

We’ve been having many ideas about which product we could develop to help poor countries: trash bag (to have an impact on waste management), pens etc. Nevertheless, education appeared to us to be the best like for like idea, and pens were not original enough, thus we’ve decided to sell papers: everybody uses it everyday, needs it to do many things (writing, printing etc.). People have to buy papers and buy it quite frequently. The money coming from the sales would allow us to build schools, to educate teachers and to remunerate them. This would be a great starting point to our project to fight against the danger of illiteracy.

About a precise location for our action, we have been thinking of South Sudan since figures show that less than 30% of the people are literate. Among them, only 15% of women are able to read and write. It is an astonishingly low figure. Unfortunately, these are not made up numbers. If you take a look at the charts (taken from the file Building a Better Future : Education for an Independent South Sudan by UNESCO) below, you will realize how real and grave the situation is. We want to help them, everyone should want to. Besides the lack of (efficient) teachers, there is also a need for textbooks for the pupils we could answer by selling Dr Paper’s paper under the One brand. You can bring your support too.

The main difficulties have been about the originality of the project and of the product, since many students had the same idea as us, and there are already many organizations dealing with this issue. However, we are working on ways to make our product more original and more attractive.

ONE should always have the right to learn.

(Title of the article inspired by the song "One Vision", written and interpreted by Queen)

Welcome on this blog; let us introduce you to our project.

What we had to do was finding a concrete product to add to the One brand, a product with its own “like for like” concept to improve the living conditions of some people in the planet. We all started thinking about education because we thought it was a valuable and important project. First, we wanted to sell pens made of recycled plastic, and we started working on that project, by searching for the prices of the competitors and concrete project ideas.

After looking for prices in a supermarket and finding a project in South Sudan, we realized that maybe our project was not so unique, so we decided to change our product without changing our project (as education appeared as an essential issue). This is how we started thinking about paper. Our idea would be to sell paper, recycled or not, in order to promote education in South Sudan. Indeed, illiteracy rate is very important there: only 15% of women and 25% of men are able to read. This project could be a way to finance teachers and schools and could help people learning how to read. These people would then be able to teach their own children or parents and multiply our impact this way. Moreover, they would also have more access to health information, independence, and could be more qualified. To know is to be able to fight against a problem.

We now have to search market prices related to paper, study what could be the supplying costs of that product, and then we will think of how to use the money left. After that, we will study the design of the product: it has to show the consumer what will be the concrete actions made in South Sudan. We also have to determine whether we want to use recycled paper or not: we are afraid it might discourage the consumer to buy it because of a high price, but we also think deforestation is a major issue that we cannot ignore today.

But no worries about this entire thing, our friend Dr. Paper will guide you all along.