The African Storybook Project Starting in 2013...

This blogpost is taken from the SAIDE December newsletter

Saide is soon to launch an exciting new project aimed at contributing to the improvement of reading and literacy for young African children. The project is funded by Comic Relief. Tessa Welch provides background to the project and reports on a workshop that Saide held recently with potential project partners.

The African Storybook Project (ASP) will create and encourage the use of a digital library of stories for the first few years of reading in digital formats, openly licensed, with a process and tools for translating and versioning stories for local African languages and contexts. This will enable users to upload and share versions of the stories in their local languages, providing numbers of stories in a range of languages way beyond the scope of conventional publishing.

In this way we aim to provide African children with sufficient familiar language stories for enjoyable reading practice to create a firm basis for literacy development.

The initial pilot will take place in South Africa, Kenya and Uganda.

We held a workshop on 10th November this year to explore the key issues before starting the project. We thought it would be a good idea not only to discuss but also to experience different ways of creation, presentation and translation/versioning. An account of the sessions is followed by our noteson key issues explored, and finally, much valued advice from participants. 

Initial issues

• Issue 1: What types of stories will be part of the African Storybook Project?
• Issue 2:Translation and versioning
• Issue 3: Teachers and parents as vital role players in children learning to read
• Issue 4: How do we provide illustrations for contributed stories in a cost effective but high quality way?
• Issue 5: What is involved in putting child-created stories on a website?
• Issue 6: How do we deal with the tension between providing quality stories (curation) and giving users the freedom to upload their own stories (experimentation)?
• Issue 7: What technological models of delivery or creation/uploading of stories should be used? High tech or low tech or both?

Next steps

Story Acquisition
We need a critical mass of stories in a range of languages in order to be able to start work in the pilot countries in the middle of next year.

We are aware that there is quite a lot of free material already on the website and we already have a process for exploring, assessing, downloading and categorising this material systematically.

We are also inviting all interested parties to submit stories to us. If you are interested in helping us, here are the guidelines:

Our main interest is stories that children can read themselves when they're in the first stages of reading - a few words or a sentence a page, with an accompanying illustration - althrough there is place for more difficult read-aloud stories as well. We're looking for African stories in languages spoken in Africa that will appeal to African children up to the age of 9 or 10. You can send us typed up stories with or without illustrations, or scanned PDF stories with illustrations, or recordings of stories, songs and games. When you send us a story, please also send the information about the story as per the attached form. Send the stories to: tessaw@saide.org.za and jennyl@saide.org.za. If your stories are too large to email, let us know and we'll invite you to our Dropbox folder where you can upload large files free of charge.

PartnershipsThe African Storybook Project will be a project of partnerships - we do not see ourselves in competition with other projects, but cooperating with and complementing existing initiatives in ways that are mutually beneficial.

Through the work of Judith Baker over a number of years, the project has a list of over 40 potential partners in the three pilot countries of Kenya, Uganda and South Africa, but also in Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia, Sierra Leone,South Sudan and Zambia. In addition, there are possible partnerships through organisations that work across Sub Saharan Africa such as the TESSA programme and the Canadian literacy organisation, CODE.

We intend in the new year to consolidate and concretise these partnerships through the development of memorandums of understanding and careful collective planning.

But we are also continually extending our partnerships.

If you are working in early literacy or children's book development and would like to partner with us, please contact either tessaw@saide.org.za or Judithbakr@gmail.com.