The Lord’s servant will be made “a light of the nations,” this Sunday’s first reading from the Book of Isaiah promises. World development organizations know that good reading habits light the way to a better future for a nation’s schoolchildren. To that end, the San Francisco-based nonprofit organization Worldreader has launched a “one Kindle per child” experiment in Uganda and two other African countries.

The Kindle project in developing countries faces considerable challenges, including the cost of e-readers and making sure that kids actually learn better on the devices than with old-fashioned books. Africa is littered with well-intentioned technology programs that fail, say observers, because devices don’t get used, fall into the wrong hands, or just can’t find enough power to run.

Early results at Worldreader are promising, said David Risher, cofounder of Worldreader and a former Amazon executive. E-readers have some advantages over laptops in far-flung places. Kindles are lightweight and rugged and can last weeks on a single charge. With built-in internet connections, they are basically big mobile phones—a technology that has proved successful throughout Africa.

Compared with traditional books, e-readers make it easy to distribute works from African authors that can be hard to get in print. School libraries in many developing countries contain mostly books donated from the U.S. or other developed nations. “The first books we got were mainly about the U.S., with kids playing in ice—which our pupils would not understand,” said Ester Nabwire, head teacher at one Ugandan school testing Kindles. “With the Kindles, there are African authors, African names which are exciting the kids.”

Still, Kindles are relatively expensive—some schools lock them up at night—and getting an e-book into the hands of one of Worldreader’s kids costs about $5 per title. By comparison, Room to Read, a 12-year-old nonprofit organization that builds libraries for elementary schools, says it can print and deliver one of its own books to a school for about $1 per book in Africa.

In Asia, where Room to Read has the most programs, only 30 percent of the cost of establishing a library involves printing and distributing books, while the rest goes toward furniture, training teachers, and monitoring to make sure the books are getting used.

Source: An article by Geoffrey A. Fowler and Nicholas Bariyo for the Wall Street Journal