Responding to the book gap in Africa: ADEA and the Global Book Alliance

• In Event: Ensuring books for every child: Operationalizing the Global Book Alliance

Proposal

The Global Book Alliance (GBA) is expected to help stem out the paucity of reading materials for children around the world, especially in Africa and Asia. The Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA) is regarded as a key partner in this important intervention because it is already connected to and works very closely with Ministries of Education across Africa. In addition, ADEA’s Working Group on Books and Learning Materials (WGBLM) has for years now been in the forefront in advocating for books and reading across Africa and is currently involved in an Advocacy Campaign aimed at influencing the formulation of National Book Policies and National Policies for Libraries and Public Reading. ADEA and the GBA are partnering to ensure that books for children are developed, produced and distributed through interventions that should see books becoming commonplace for children, especially those written in languages children speak and understand. This will ostensibly ensure the acquisition of knowledge and critical skills from an early stage and help develop the reading habit.

The primary objectives of the GBA/ADEA partnership are to have policy dialogue, provide training and technical support, and facilitate communications around the Global Book Alliance. To promote policy dialogue, the partnership will identify African Ministers of Education who could be “champions” and “change leaders” to advocate for the GBA. Some of these Ministers will serve on the GBA Advisory Committee. Training activities and technical support will be country-based to enable writers and publishers of early grade reading materials to produce more and better quality books in national languages. The WGBLM will develop a communications plan to Inform, sensitize and involve actors in the book chain, decision makers, and other stakeholders, on the objectives, methodology and mechanisms of the GBA. The communications plan will facilitate and disseminate relevant GBA messages to African partners.

This paper will allow the audience to engage with ADEA and discuss country and regional progress to date and to determine ways that CIES can be more involved with the country-level response to the book gap.

Author

• Aliou Sow, ADEA