Publications

These best practice quality recommendations for children’s books are a product of the public-private partnership of the REACH Project. They are intended for use by publishers during book creation, development, and production, as well as by purchasers and librarians for collection development.
The recommendations were derived from the REACH Consultative Workshop, held in November 2017, with representatives from government, the NGO sector, and commercial publishing (through the Publishers’ Association of South Africa).

Openly licensed resources are ‘free’ to access, but there are significant creation, adaptation, production, and use costs. The long-term sustainability of local-language publishing requires that these costs be met fairly, using financial models that will enable people to establish, grow, and maintain effective content creation organizations. This research aims to raise awareness of the various costs that go into producing and translating storybooks and of the relationship between investment and quality. It also serves to illustrate emerging business models for local organizations creating content using open licensing that funders and governments might wish to fund to support effective early literacy acquisition in developing countries.

This case study tells the story of a small Ugandan NGO’s experience using openly licensed government primers to support early primary literacy. Mango Tree Literacy Lab  (MTLL) believes that African children have the right to read, write and engage with ideas in a language they know and understand. MTLL aspires to work side by side with government to ensure successful implementation of innovative education policies, making mistakes and learning within the constraints of real-world challenges. This case study describes how MTLL began to explore how the open licensing of national literacy materials could be harnessed to print additional copies for schools with insufficient numbers of usable primers.

If you are planning to translate a storybook from one language to another, then these recommendations are for you. They offer helpful ideas on how to ensure the final story in the new language is high quality. A high-quality translation is one that was not necessarily translated word-for-word, but that retains the meaning and sensibility of the original story in the new language. At the same time, the new story may adjust to the specifics of a new language (e.g. the complexity of certain words), as well as the cultural context that comes with the new language. Essentially, translating is creating a new version of a story in another language.

High quality translations are important because they hold the power to create more quality stories for children to read. This is valuable especially in languages where written stories are scarce. In South Africa, the publishing industry focuses on Afrikaans and English, while African-language storybooks remain few. With quality translations, however, a publisher, NGO, writer or others can take a single written story and multiply it into more.

These recommendations were created through the Results in Education for All Children (REACH) Project and funded by the REACH trust fund at the World Bank and the Global Book Alliance. The goal of the REACH Project is to impact the children’s storybook industry in South Africa to ensure all children have exciting stories to read.

With funding from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, and as part of its work on the early literacy ecosystem and open licensing, Neil Butcher & Associates (NBA) is conducting research into the successful sharing of alternative content creation and distribution models that harness open licensing. One project contributing to this research is the role of community libraries in creating high quality children’s stories written in local languages, and making these accessible with an open licence. NBA’s goal is to contribute to enhancing the availability of children’s books in mother‐tongue languages in Africa, using open licensing. This report by Ken Harley is a review of two projects – one in Uganda and one in Ethiopia.

The Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), through its Working Group on Books and Learning Materials (WGBLM), teamed up with the Global Book Alliance (GBA) to dialogue with African book industry stakeholders about publishing and use of materials in mother-tongue languages, and to come up with a way forward. The dialogue focused on how to ensure sustainable book provision for children in lower primary schools by improving the creation, production, access, distribution and use of books in local languages.

Seventy key stakeholders in the African book publishing industry, representing eleven Francophone, ten Anglophone, one Lusophone country, as well as twelve representatives of development partners, held a high-level technical meeting to: (i) present the GBA’s mission, vision, objectives, strategies; (ii) strengthen local coordination of major stakeholders (writers, publishers, booksellers, and reading specialists); and (iii) improve local coordination and policy dialogue between governments and book professionals in implementing book provision.