To improve children’s reading skills, the Liberty Community Trust has partnered with not-for-profit
organisation Book Dash on their 2nd virtual event which aims to give kids more access to books to
help improve literacy.
Progress in Literacy Study (PRILS) revealed that 78% of South African children in grade 4 cannot read
for meaning. The question we need to ask ourselves is how we can ensure that children own books
at a young age to help curb this crisis since they cost too much from traditional publishers.
“If we implement literacy and numeracy programmes in critical schooling phases for the
under-resourced communities, it will contribute to enabling young children to learn to read and own
books at a young age.” says Nomaxabiso Matjila, Head of CSI at Liberty.
The Book Dash organisation was founded in 2014 with the belief and vision that every child should
own 100 books by the age of 5 years. To date it has worked with over 200 organisations to get books
to young children.
“The Book Dash partnership ties in with the Liberty Community Trust’s initiative called Yizani Sifunde
Books for All which aims to enable young children to own books and develop cognitive learning as a
gateway to financial freedom,” says Matjila. The Yizani Sifunde Books for All initiative is made up of
three Nnon-profit Oorganisations which aim to improve and provide an environment for reading and
distribute close to half a million books within under-resourced communities over the next three
years.
For the virtual event, a team of volunteers working online for 12 hours across eight countries worked
together to create African story books online that will be available for free to young children.
The team consisted of writers, illustrators, designers and editors across the world that collaborated
to produce 6 virtual books despite the pandemic. These story books would then be translated to
three different languages, English, Afrikaans, Xhosa and finally distributed to 120 education centres.
“This project started among friends who volunteered their creative and professional skills to write,
translate, print and distribute African story books. These would be published at a reduced cost
making affordable picture books accessible for all children,” says Michelle Matthews, Founding
Member at Book Dash.
Liberty Community Trust’s funding partnership with the three NGOs ensures that we are
contributing towards equipping children with strong literacy skills in the hope of improving schooling
performance, which in turn will lead to improved economic development. Initiatives like this ensures
Liberty’s belief that “knowledge shared can change people’s realities.”
