Background: A strong link between phonological awareness (PA) and literacy exists,

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GraphoGame (GG) is originally a technology-based intervention method for supporting children with reading difficulties. It is now known that children who face problems in reading acquisition have difficulties in learning to differentiate and manipulate speech sounds and consequently, in connecting these sounds to corresponding letters. GG was developed to provide intensive training in matching speech sounds and larger units of speech to their written counterparts. GG has been shown to benefit children with reading difficulties and the game is now available for all Finnish school children for literacy support. Presently millions of children in Africa fail to learn to read despite years of primary school education. As many African languages have transparent writing systems similar in structure to Finnish, it was hypothesized that GG-based training of letter-sound correspondences could also be effective in supporting children’s learning in African countries. In this article we will describe how GG has been developed from a Finnish dyslexia prevention game to an intervention method that can be used not only to improve children’s reading performance but also to raise teachers’ and parents’ awareness of the development of reading skill and effective reading instruction methods. We will also provide an overview of the GG activities in Zambia, Kenya, Tanzania, and Namibia, and the potential to promote education for all with a combination of scientific research and mobile learning.

For the past two decades effort has been made to create measures for studying the home environment. However, developing meaningful measures that allow for comparisons across different contexts, for example in Western and nonWestern countries, is a challenge. This paper describes a study carried out to identify indicators that would best describe the home environment in a rural setting in Tanzania. Data were collected from a sample of 300 mothers/female guardians from a rural community in the coastal area of Tanzania. The home environment was assessed using a questionnaire-based interview about the home living and home literacy environments. Based on distributions and correlation analysis, five key variables were found and regarded as significant indicators. These are fathers' and mothers' education, house wall material, light source, and the number of books for school subjects in the homes. The indicators found are proposed as being useful for surveys for different purposes, e.g. research, educational, social, and political decisions. However, the key indicators identified should not be assumed to be the most prominent ones in another cultural setting without empirical testing.

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