Engaging Public-Private Partnerships to Create Wider Access to Storybooks

• In Event: Best practices and innovations in children’s storybook publishing: public-private partnerships, quality translations, open licensing, and pooled procurement

Proposal

Only about 14% (1) of South African citizens read for pleasure. South Africa faces the significant challenge of encouraging a culture of reading both among adults and among young readers, which in turn gives rise to two other challenges. First, the book supply chain fails to provide adequate quantity or quality of early-grade storybooks in languages other than English and Afrikaans; this is necessary as it is in the early grades where the love of reading and a reading culture starts. The current supply chain emphasizes formal classroom material (textbooks and readers) over story books for enjoyment. Reading for pleasure is widely cited as key to developing lifelong readers and educated adults. (2) Yet when curricular ties and tightly levelled text become the focus of book development, high-interest story-lines and high-quality illustrations often suffer. This also happens because the capacity necessary to create an imaginative story where the text and illustrations work seamlessly together is lacking among many publishers. Second, limited budgets and unresponsive procurement systems make it difficult for committed government officials to purchase enough of the right books at the right time. The same procurement systems inhibit commercial publishers from broadening the languages in which they publish.

This session explores how public-private partnerships can contribute to sustainability and how engaging with government at various levels, and other key stakeholders, can facilitate the creation of storybooks and access to these books. It includes an outline of some of the challenges faced by government in this endeavour. It also explores how engaging publishers to develop the appropriate books can assist with access and sustainability.

In particular, the session will describe lessons learnt from the World Bank-funded REACH project including important considerations in developing the partnership; who was involved, key challenges and what we did to alleviate them, and the benefits of government buy-in to the process.

1. http://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/only-14-of-south-africans-read-books-motshekga-20160429
2. BOP Consulting, The UK Reading Agency Literature Review: The impact of reading for pleasure and empowerment, June 2015.

Author

• Vanessa Francis, Room to Read