Why the African Storybook Project?
Over the last decade, African Governments have made dramatic progress in pursuing the goal of Education for All. However, the reading literacy levels of African children after the first three years of schooling are far from adequate, both in providing the basic ability to read as well as the literacy necessary to proceed to the next level of schooling.

There are many reasons for this. A key obstacle to learning to read is the shortage of appropriate stories for early reading in languages familiar to the young African child. There are few or no picture books for young children, and very little material of any kind in the 'familiar' languages of most African children.

Since young Africans have very little to read in familiar languages, they often do not learn to read well or enjoy reading. This in turn means that there is not a market for African language books and publishers cannot afford to produce many such books. So young Africans end up with very little to read and the cycle continues.

Our Vision
Our vision is for all African children to have enough stories in a language familiar to them to practise reading and learn to love reading. We believe that literacy practices on the continent can be transformed by providing sufficient enjoyable stories in a familiar language, and encouraging caregivers and teachers to read them with children.

But we cannot possibly create sufficient stories in the thousands of languages spoken on the African continent unless we share the stories we have, and enable users to translate/version stories into their own languages.

To do this, we need three things:

1. A website – a place to share and create the stories
2. Openly licensed stories – which allow free use, as well as adaptation and translation
3. Partners – people who contribute to and use the website and the stories.

Our website
On www.africanstorybook.org - under construction, ready early 2014, you will be able to:

• find enjoyable stories for children to read,
• translate them into a local language or dialect,
• adapt the stories for the reading level you need,
• create and your own stories in one of the templates provided,
• upload them onto the website for others to engage with and use,
• download and print the stories, or read them on a variety of devices.

The Stories
Our main interest is stories that children can read on their own when they are in the first stages of reading. READ ALONE stories will be picture books where illustrations support first words or first sentences. Some may be paragraph stories and have fewer illustrations.

We are aquiring the stories in a variety of ways:

• Openly licensed stories on the Internet
• Out of print books
• Donations from literacy development organisations or individual authors
• Stories collected from individuals in the pilot sites.
• Story development workshops and processes.

We have created a Masterlist of all stories collected and considered for publishing.

Extract from our Master List of over 400 possible stories collected Jan to July 2013

Some of these (for example, Goso the Teacher) we illustrate and adapt as read alone stories, and then place in one of our templates. Some we will post on the website as PDFs (for example, the openly licensed Pratham Books).

All the stories have an English version in order to facilitate reversioning into a variety of languages (for example, Izinwele has the English words on the page under the isiZulu words).

We believe that stories are very important – stories with characters and happenings and problems to solve. But we are also interested in songs, and riddles and games, wherever possible with audio clips so that we can learn how to sing the songs or play the games.

To provide exemplars of the kinds of stories we need, we are engaging in a range of story development activities, such as:

• versioning and illustrating folktakes and translating them into the languages of our pilot sites;
• using stories that have been given to us, putting them into our templates and translating them into the languages of our pilot sites;
• creating an image bank to assist our users to illustrate the stories they create themselves;
• conducting story development workshops in our pilot countries.

When the www.africanstorybook.org is up and running and populated in 2014, users will be able to create their own stories using one of the templates designed by Natalie Morton of Sugar and Spice Design. Natalie has created provisional templates for us in Powerpoint, so that we can 'play' and see how to make the template work well. You can see drafts of the stories in the template to date if you click on the titles of the stories in the article entitled ASP draft stories.

Our Partners
Everyone who contributes to and uses our website and our stories will be our partner. But in order to encourage use, we are talking to people, not only from our pilot countries, but from Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Rwanda, Zambia and Haiti to discuss ways of using and contributing to the digital library. We are exploring possible partnerships with the following organisations:

• Friends of African Village Libraries (FAVL), and the association of community libraries in Uganda (UgCLA), as well as the Multilingual Education Network in Uganda.
• The RTI SHARP project in Uganda, developing local language reading resources and teacher training in 16 of the 36 Ugandan languages.
• The Aga Khan Foundation – working in early literacy in both Kenya and Uganda.
• The National Book Development Council of Kenya.
• PRAESA (Project for Alternative Education in South Africa), and in particular their Nal'ibali reading campaign.
• Puku Books – a website dedicated to information about and advocacy for children's literature in local languages in Southern Africa and beyond.
• The Molteno Institute for Language and Literacy based in Johannesburg.
• CODE – supporting literacy and book development in Canada and around the world, including a number of African countries.
• The TESSA programme: particularly their project to develop openly licensed teacher education resources to support the teaching of reading in the early grades in Sub Saharan Africa.
• The Centre for the Promotion of Literacy in Sub-Saharan Africa (CAPOLSA) based at the University of Zambia.
• Partners in Health in Rwanda and Haiti
• SIL (Summer Institute of Linguistics) an NPO that build capacity for sustainable language development and produces dictionaries and systems of orthography in African languages.
• Yellobric, a UK based charity facilitating the delivery and use of e-content to support educational development in SubSaharan Africa.

We are linking up in the various countries with key universities and teacher training institutions such as Kenyatta University and the University of Barraton in Kenya, Kyambogo and Makerere Universities in Uganda, and Durban University of Technology and several other universities in South Africa, and the University of Education Winneba in Ghana.

In each of our pilot countries, we are meeting with officials from relevant government departments to discuss ways of working with them.

Our pilot sites
To encourage and learn from use, we are working with teachers and librarians and community workers in pilot sites across Kenya, Uganda and South Africa. The sites are community libraries, ECD centres, primary schools, located in both rural and urban contexts; some with few local languages, and others with many; some with grid electricity, some with solar power, and some without power; some very remote, and some quite near urban centres. Their location is plotted in the map in the side panel.

For Frequently Asked Questions click here

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Project Leader
Tessa Welch – africanstorybook@saide.org.za Tel: +27 11 403 2813

In-country co-ordinators
Kenya: Dorcas Wepukhulu Nafula – dnweppy@gmail.com
South Africa: Sheila Drew – sheilad@saide.org.za ; Lorato Trok – loratot@saide.org.za
Uganda: Juliet Tembe – tembehirome02@gmail.com _______________________________________________________________________________