Transforming children’s literature in Burundi: our experiences, our stories

• In Event: Highlighted Session: The transition from oral to written: Leveraging indigenous stories to create culturally relevant reading materials and a culture of reading

Proposal

Every country has indigenous stories that if tapped into can enrich children’s reading experiences, while also protesting stories that are not relevant. However, the low reading culture most often leaves children feeling left behind and missing out on opportunities that will equip them to experience improved well-being. To build a reading habit, our program engages children, adolescents, parents, and teachers, to unlock their literacy potential through the promotion of locally written and published stories. We mobilize them to become local writers using the language they know and understand to write their own stories to develop stronger readers and writers.

A challenge in Burundi is that learning is not engaging and is seen as not relevant to children’s realities and that children’s stories are disconnected from the rural contexts in which they live. To make children’s reading experience more enriching and inviting we have made use of a user-friendly story creation software, Bloom, that allows us to develop local language books for children to use as emergent readers and readers in early grades.

By using Bloom, we have produced 300 local language titles for children where children are seeing their community and are very enthusiastic to read their own story. Community artists are selected as illustrators and often draw very well-known people in the villages which deepened their own knowledge of their heritage and has created a stronger interest in writing and reading.

The community’s excitement around their own ideas, pictures, materials, and stories has inspired a new cadre of writers and artists to consistently produce children’s books. We not only collaborated with community writers and artists, but also the MoE for sustainability to promote the creation of children’s literature as a national priority for increasing children’s access to meaningful reading opportunities. This has evolved into a desire for a new printing enterprise for children’s books in Burundi. Based on our experience of stimulating interest in reading through local language content, we recommend an enabling approach that uses assessment, teacher instruction, ongoing community engagement, especially community-led production of reading materials that are relevant for their context. This can be embraced and owned by the whole community.


The project has applied the five core competencies that children need to become readers, alongside the use of Bloom to increase access to content that children feel excited about and understand in their home language. While we have been able to promote the methodology with the government we will need collective efforts with communities, other organizations and publishers and printers to transform the architecture of young children’s literature. Even in three years, we have observed that the production of 300 community stories that have emerged from the community’s experiences has changed the reading environment and perceptions around reading and that the level of engagement for children’s literacy among teachers and other educational personnel to avail local supplementary reading materials grew from 0% to 33% in the areas where we implement our reading intervention.

Authors

• Alisa Michelle Phillips, World Vision

• Venuste VN Nitereka, World Vision Burundi