Today is International Literacy Day, and this year the theme is “Literacy and Women’s Empowerment”—a reminder to us all of the need for increased commitment to literacy, especially for girls and women. This theme reinforces and adds a particular focus to the United Nation’s Literacy Decade efforts to encourage a world-wide commitment to issues of literacy.
One of the multitude of events happening around the world in celebration of the day is the award ceremony for UNESCO 2010 International Literacy Prizes, which recognize innovative approaches to literacy education and is taking place at the organization’s headquarters, in Paris. UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize, sponsored by the Republic of Korea, will be given to projects in Cape Verde and Germany, and programs in Nepal and Egypt will be receiving the UNESCO Confucius Prize for Literacy, supported by the People’s Republic of China. You can find the complete list of winning projects and honorable mentions here.
Also happening today, following the awards ceremony, is the launch of a very welcome and potentially transformative initiative: the Knowledge and Innovations Network for Literacy (KINL). Created with support from Verizon Foundation and Microsoft, the Network, which will be operational beginning November 1, will work as a virtual workplace where literacy researchers and practitioners can share knowledge and debate literacy topics online, with the goal of generating new ideas and practices.
Let us know how you are celebrating the day at your school, library or household. And keep in mind that, in the US, one way you can show your support for the right to literacy is by signing this declaration. Before delivering it to President Obama, ProLiteracy is sending the declaration scroll around the country to gather signatures from individuals and mayors.
We all deserve a world in which children and adults have the literacy skills they need to lead happy, productive and fulfilling lives, so let’s each do our part—and every little bit counts!— to promote literacy.
You can find PaperTigers’ archived Literacy issue here. To see all our literacy-related blog posts, click on the “World Literacy” category, on the sidebar.
During our session with the IFLA (International Federation of Libraries Associations and Institutions) in Bologna, both speakers (Patsy Aldana and Viviana Quiñones) stressed the importance of children having access to books which both reflect their experiences and open windows onto other customs and cultures. We were urged to pay a visit to the stand shared by a number of different African publishers, and there we met three very special publishers, all producing books to meet that demand.
The first two were librarians we had met at the session the day before: Antoinette F. Correa from BLD (Bibliothèque-Lecture-Développement) Éditions in Senegal and Pili Dumea of the Children’s Book Project (CBP) for Tanzania.
Antoinette, pictured right with a selection of her books, told me that she set up BLD Éditions to meet the needs of both teachers and pupils, who were crying out for access to good books in their own language. She is a well-known figure in the IFLA, and sees the continued development of libraries as crucial work: as well as publishing books, BLD helps to set up libraries and trains librarians.
Pili, pictured left, is secretary to the CBP for Tanzania, which, again, connects children with books published locally. Last year the CBP was awarded the UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize for its work promoting the love of books among children and adults. One eleven-year-old, talking about her school library, following the school’s affiliation to the CBP, said
“I have read most of the books in the school library which helped me learn about different topics through interesting stories told in our own national language, Kiswahili, which is easier to understand than English.”
The third publisher was Bakamé Éditions from Rwanda, who publish children’s books in the national language, Kinyarwanda, which is understood by all Rwandans. They also run various projects to promote reading, including their “Bibliothèque en route” – a rucksack library, which takes books out to children who do not have access to an actual library. It gets a tiny mention on their English pages, but if you read French, there’s more here. Editions Bakamé was the joint recipient of this year’s IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award and this article on IBBY’s website is also an interesting read.
The work these organisations are doing is truly awe-inspiring and it was a real privilege to meet Antoinette and Pili.