Our Purpose

We drive rickshaws over across subcontinents, get lost on purpose, eat things we can’t identify and come home changed by every trip.

However, we started noticing something we could not ignore: the places that move us most are often the places where children grow up without ever learning to read.

So we decided every Kublai Kai adventure would also be a mission to raise awareness about literacy and raise money for The World Literacy Foundation. To date, we have raised over $27,000 — and we are just getting started.

The Stats

We are not people who lead with statistics. We lead with stories. But sometimes the numbers are the story — and these ones demand to be heard.

Here is what the World Literacy Foundation's own research tells us about why this matters:

• 770 million people cannot read a single word. A further 2 billion struggle to read a sentence. Worldliteracyfoundation

• Two-thirds of illiterate adults are women — systematically excluded from economic opportunity, healthcare, and civic life. Worldliteracyfoundation

• Book ownership among children from low-income backgrounds is less than 20%. In developing countries, the number of children without foundational literacy skills is rising by an estimated 20% per year. Worldliteracyfoundation

• Illiteracy costs the global economy approximately $1.19 trillion every year. Worldliteracyfoundation