Open Licensing

Open Educational Resources (OER) offer a powerful means of expanding the reach and the effectiveness of education worldwide. For this reason, COL and UNESCO co-organised the World OER Congress in 2012 in Paris, which resulted in the OER Paris Declaration: a statement urging governments around the world to release, as OER, all teaching, learning and research materials developed with public funds.

A key barrier to improving children's reading skills is limited or no access to textbooks and reading materials. An open education resource (OER) policy could help progress Early Grade Reading (EGR) efforts and is now a policy requirement for all United States Government-funded projects. Can stakeholders in the book production chain embrace an OER model, finding benefit in the approach for their businesses?

Openly licensed resources are ‘free’ to access, but there can be significant user, creation, adaptation, and production costs. The long-term sustainability of African publishing in local languages requires that these costs be met fairly and completely, using models that will encourage people to establish, grow, and sustain excellent content creation organizations.

Mango Tree Literacy Lab (MTLL) is a Ugandan NGO that believes that African children have the right to read, write and engage with ideas in a language they know and understand. Since 2010, Mango Tree has been supporting early primary literacy in the Lango Sub-region of northern Uganda.

The Impact of Open Licensing on the Early Reader Ecosystem examines how to use open licensing to promote quality learning resources for young children that are relevant and interesting.

Pragmatic Approaches to Open Licensing: Is revenue generation possible? This presentation was created for the Association for the Development in Africa (ADEA) and Global Book Alliance Seminar on Open Licensing in Accra, Ghana on 2 September, 2018.

Soma Book Cafe in Dar es Salaam is a readership promotion space and innovative co-creation hub for literary expression and multimedia storytelling approaches. It provides different arenas for literary expression and discourse; promotes reading for pleasure and encourages independent pursuit of knowledge.

The African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA) and NBA developed a short online course for African librarians and library staff, based on the findings of a survey conducted in 2021. The main course objectives were to:

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) convened a small workshop, which brought together key players in early literacy in Africa.

As schools in Uganda closed down in late March 2020 due to Covid-19, Mango Tree Literacy Lab (MTLL) had to reconsider its 2020 work plan.