The 2nd virtual Book Dash event recently took place to help boost literacy in SA, ensure every child has access to books and to make bookmaking affordable.
South Africa (11 November 2020) – To improve children’s reading skills, the Liberty Community Trust has partnered with not-for-profit organisation Book Dash on their 2nd virtual event which aims to give kids more access to books to help improve literacy.
Progress in Literacy Study (PRILS) revealed that 78% of South African children in grade 4 cannot read for meaning. The question we need to ask ourselves is how we can ensure that children own books at a young age to help curb this crisis since they cost too much from traditional publishers.
“If we implement literacy and numeracy programmes in critical schooling phases for the under-resourced communities, it will contribute to enabling young children to learn to read and own books at a young age.” says Nomaxabiso Matjila, Head of CSI at Liberty.
The Book Dash organisation was founded in 2014 with the belief and vision that every child should own 100 books by the age of 5 years. To date, it has worked with over 200 organisations to get books to young children.
“The Book Dash partnership ties in with the Liberty Community Trust’s initiative called Yizani Sifunde Books for All which aims to enable young children to own books and develop cognitive learning as a gateway to financial freedom,” says Matjila.
The Yizani Sifunde Books for All initiative is made up of three non-profit organisations which aim to improve and provide an environment for reading and distribute close to half a million books within under-resourced communities over the next three years.
For the virtual event, a team of volunteers working online for 12 hours across eight countries worked together to create African storybooks online that will be available for free to young children.
The team consisted of writers, illustrators, designers and editors across the world that collaborated to produce 6 virtual books despite the pandemic. These storybooks would then be translated into three different languages, English, Afrikaans, Xhosa and finally distributed to 120 education centres.
“This project started among friends who volunteered their creative and professional skills to write, translate, print and distribute African storybooks. These would be published at a reduced cost making affordable picture books accessible for all children,” says Michelle Matthews, Founding Member at Book Dash.
Liberty Community Trust’s funding partnership with the three NGOs ensures that we are contributing towards equipping children with strong literacy skills in the hope of improving schooling performance, which in turn will lead to improved economic development. Initiatives like this ensure Liberty’s belief that “knowledge shared can change people’s realities.”
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