Creating materials and access for African children to learn to read: The African storybook project

Health care and basic literacy are closely related, especially in Africa. Although the percent of African children attending school has grown tremendously, in part because of the Millennium Development Goal of universal free primary education by 2015 universally adopted in Africa, the proportion of children actually becoming literate is as low as 20% in some countries and higher than 65% in few. Far too many children cannot learn the basic science to understand modern health and health care, and most adults cannot read materials they receive from a clinic or medical office. One key reason for this is that there are few or no early reading books available in most parts of the African continent - particularly in non-European languages. Children tend to enter school without the 'school readiness' skills which are the foundation for learning to read text, such things as being able to identify shapes and colors, identifying letter shapes, matching sounds and letters, and using graphic images for motivation. Another reason is that teachers, faced with this school 'unreadiness' and also with curriculum coverage pressure and lack of text materials, feel forced to resort to 'rote' learning or memorization of content, thus providing children with little time to practice with texts even if they have them. The African Storybook is building a continent wide network to create enough appropriate children's early reading to move from scarcity to abundance, and to promote access through digital platforms, from phones to computers or whatever comes next.