I think if there is one thing that unites everyone at EBTKS it is a love of words; whether they are written or spoken, we value articulation and communication. I attribute my love of language to the abundance of books in my childhood.These books opened my eyes to the world is all its diversity and brilliance and allowed me to go on lengthy adventures in an afternoon. Some of my favourite memories involve being read to as a child and now I treasure the times when I listen to my friend’s children read stories to me.
Not all children are so lucky and there is a real lack of decent, educational books available in many languages of the world. This means children grow up without much inspiring reading material in their native tongues. I think back to the library in my own small town and there was a veritable universe of information stacked on its shelves. (Don’t get me started on cuts to our own libraries in the UK….). It saddens me to think that around 260 million children in the world have limited access to books in their mother tongue.
I learnt this statistic from Michael Jones, who is the executive director of Open Free Equal, an organisation that provides resources for educators in the developing world. Michael explained to me that their new campaign, Literacy for Anywhere, is addressing this dearth of reading material in developing countries by creating fifty translatable, high-quality books that can be downloaded free of charge, allowing educators to print books in their native languages at a fraction of the cost of producing them from scratch. All the organisation has to do is translate the books and print them. They are even looking into low-ink and eBook versions of the books. The program will make it possible for organizations to make books for students whose native languages are obscure or lack national support.
The idea came to Michael when he was working in Cambodia three years ago, “I worked with a small NGO that supported an even smaller library. I started talking to a scholar of Cambodian language who told me he had visited the library and was impressed. In fact, he said, it was possibly the world’s largest collection of Cambodian children’s literature. I was shocked. That library, which was about the size of a small kitchen back home, probably held the largest collection of native language books a Cambodian child could ever hope to see. I had also been on book buying trips only to realize that there were hardly any options for expanding the library, and no good ones.”
Literacy for Anywhere means even small organisations can have access to the books, even those in remote areas. Utilising new technologies not only saves money but also gives power back to educators who best know their students. They can print books for a few hundred dollars per library rather than waiting for larger organisations to come to them.
Michael and I live in Cambodia and it is the Cambodian language versions of the books that will launch first. Michael says, “We hope to print a run of the first book in Khmer next month and the full series should be finished and distributed in time for the next Cambodian school year. The books will be about topics that are difficult to teach or explain without pictures and supplemental materials. The kinds of learning experiences we take for granted back home, learning about far away plants, animals, and peoples, will now be available in classrooms all over Cambodia.
Thinking about this initiative has made me realise how much I take access to books for granted and just how much I appreciate the investment of my family and my community in literary culture, not to mention my fortuity to have been born with English as my mother tongue.
Open Free Equal are currently raising funds to expand their Literacy for Anywhere program and are offering some cool incentives as thank yous for donations. More information about the project can be found at www.indiegogo.com/projects/literacy-for-anywhere.
Everything But The Kitchen Sink 