One heart. One goal. Just One solution.

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)