USAID and ADEA launch in Côte d’Ivoire the Global Book Alliance workshop in Africa
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and its partners have launched an initiative named “the Global Book Alliance (GBA),” aimed at transforming and advancing current book design, acquisition and distribution practices, especially in Africa and Asia, to ensure that students have the books they need in their mother tongue – in order to learn how to read and read to understand.
As an implementation partner on the African continent, the Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), will provide its contribution to the launch and promotion of this initiative with actors of the book chain, teachers, educationists, communications specialists, and African decision-makers. To this end, the ADEA’s Working Group on Books and Learning Material (WGBLM) will organize, in close collaboration with the Global Book Alliance and USAID, a series of field activities across the continent.
The WGBLM will thus organize in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire, from 22nd to 25th January 2018, – at the Auditorium of CCIA Building, African Development Bank Group (AfDB) – a regional workshop that will bring together representatives from ten African Francophone countries (i.e. Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Democratic Republic of Congo, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Togo and Senegal) and from ten African Anglophone countries (i.e. Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Rwanda, Somalia, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia). Each country will be represented by a delegation of three people: a representative of the Ministry of Basic Education, a textbook or national language reader publisher, and a national language author in these same languages.
The Abidjan workshop will be also a step in sensitization and advocacy for the Global Book Alliance itself and for the need to institute innovative and effective mechanisms within countries for the production, acquisition, distribution, management and use of textbooks and other reading materials in national languages to establish a solid and sustainable groundwork for the quality education of our youth.
It should be underscored that the key motivation for setting up of the Global Book Alliance is linked to the acute shortage of appropriate and attractive reading materials in the mother tongue, which impedes improvements in children’s reading skills. Indeed, children are often unable to practice reading in the language they speak and understand the most. Moreover, without the adequate supply of quality reading material, it would be difficult to get girls and boys interested in reading as well as provide them with the possibility of practicing reading, or enable family members to read to them.
Reading is key to African youth’s success, that’s why we would like to remind you this quote:
Today a reader, tomorrow a leader!
Contacts:
- Lily Nyariki, Focal point of the ADEA Working Group on Books and Learning Material (WGBLM), Eldoret, Kenya, Tel.: (+254) 733 712117, lmnyariki@gmail.com / l.nyariki@adeanet.org
- Aliou Sow, Focal point of the ADEA Working Group on Books and Learning Material (WGBLM), Tel.: (+224) 622 54 48 26 / (+001) 514 803 6190, aliou2sow@yahoo.fr
Media:
- Stefano De Cupis, Senior Communications Officer, ADEA, Tel.: (+225) 2026 4261, s.decupis@afdb.org
