teleStory – Stories from the Cloud Callum Porter
The pilot project in Mainland China, which started in June, is helping 18 children to improve their literacy.
Callum Porter-Harris (Exchange student, Business and Economics 2012-2013)
If you had US$1 million how would you change the world? Callum and other four Master’s teammates from the Shanghai Advanced Institute of Finance may just have the chance to find out if they win the money in seed funding and can realise their social enterprise teleStory.
Callum’s team, representing the Asia-Pacific region, is the first team from the Mainland university to successfully gain a place in the final competition of the HULT Prize, the world’s largest student competition for social causes which was launched in 2009 and partnered by Hult International Business School and the Clinton Global Initiative. Their teleStory aims to solve the problem of illiteracy among parents in poor regions who are unable to read a bedtime story to their children.
“We are targeting children aged from 0 to 6 of urban slum dwellers, and our pilot projects currently aim to serve those in India and Mainland China. By combining something as simple as a dumb phone with something as smart as cloud telephony, we can
get audio storybooks in the hands of children so they can learn to read, and then they will be on a more level playing field when they enter school. It also brings families together,” Callum said.
With the reusable audio storybook system and a monthly subscription of around US$1.7 charged to each user, the finance graduate believes that the model could be economically sustainable and be able to reach 10 million young children in urban slums by 2020.
