# Is Autonomous Learning Possible?

By [elimu.ai](https://paragraph.com/@elimu) · 2023-10-09

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🌍 Global Progress
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By the end of primary school age, as much as 90% of children in low-income countries are not able to read a text with comprehension.

Reading Comprehension

Across the globe, an estimated [330 million children](https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666374023000389#bib0079) of primary school age are unable to read and perform basic mathematics. Across Sub-Saharan African, 98 million children are illiterate and innumerate and do not attend school.

🧑🏽‍🏫 Lack of Teachers
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To educate these hundreds of millions of children, the world needs many more teachers. Tens of millions more.

We can take the traditional route of solving this by building more schools and recruiting more teachers. That might work over time, but are we really willing to wait several decades? And what about _today’s_ generation, are we just going to give up on them?

In addition to the enormous number of children being out-of-school, another fact is that more than half of those children already enrolled in school are not learning. For many children, schools do not live up to their promise.

So, lack of quality teachers and quality schools is a big problem, and we should look into alternative solutions.

📔 Autonomous Learning
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At elimu.ai we believe in the power (and magic) of digital technologies. And with all the technologies humanity has at its disposal today, we can create an _autonomous learning technology_ that enables children to _teach themselves_ basic literacy and numeracy skills.

![Autonomous Learning](https://storage.googleapis.com/papyrus_images/ef2080c3122456ce382b5884d2d8016a77f9cbaa913a49ceb4f7f670adefe1a5.jpg)

Autonomous Learning

Before the era of digital technologies, a child’s learning progress depended heavily on the human tutor’s availability. Now we are at a stage where each child will have their own personal digital tutor. And with it, the ability to learn fully autonomously.

Through the spread of Internet, access to information and knowledge is becoming more and more ubiquitous and less and less costly. And basic literacy and numeracy is needed to unlock a child’s access to these resources.

It might seem like magic that a small learning device is the only thing needed for a child to achieve proficiency levels in reading and mathematics. But if there is anything that this global learning crisis needs, it’s a little bit of magic! 🪄✨

🖐🏽 Basic Human Right
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If children grow up in a socio-economic position where quality literacy & numeracy instruction is not available, they still have the right to learn. Foundational literacy and numeracy is a basic human right.

This is the purpose of elimu.ai:

> Free personalized learning for every child on Earth 🌍🌎🌏

To learn more about our work, check out [https://github.com/elimu-ai](https://github.com/elimu-ai)

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*Originally published on [elimu.ai](https://paragraph.com/@elimu/is-autonomous-learning-possible)*