Dear Editor,

Illiteracy is a problem across all continents and geographical borders.

According to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), literacy is the means of identification, understanding, interpretation, creation, and communication in an increasingly digital, text-mediated, information-rich, and fast-changing world.

Literacy is a continuum of learning and proficiency in reading, writing, and using numbers throughout life and is part of a larger set of skills, which include digital skills, media literacy, education for sustainable development, and global citizenship as well as job-specific skills. Literacy skills themselves are expanding and evolving as people engage more and more with information and learning through digital technology.

UNESCO further adds, worldwide, at least 763 million adults still cannot read and write, two-thirds of them women, and 250 million children are failing to acquire basic literacy skills.

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, which caused the worst disruption to education in a century, 617 million children and teenagers had not reached minimum reading levels. As a result we need to identify more creative and appealing ways to inculcate a reading culture among the youth. The reality is books are expensive and undoubtedly this serves as one of many barriers to literacy. How can we discount the fact that boys learn differently from girls? Unfortunately, this fact is not taken into account regarding how to address literacy and this is also another barrier to literacy.

The World Bank has identified five practical ways to access open-source educational materials, especially books for young readers. In the first step, books should be identified on global digital platforms. The World Bank adds that there are several global digital “libraries” that include thousands of illustrated and well-written books in hundreds of languages on a variety of topics. For instance Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver contains 25,000 titles in 261 languages; the African Storybook Initiative contains nearly 1,500 books in 210 languages; the Bloom library, contains 6,250 titles in 410 languages. The Global Digital Library has more than 5,000 titles in 72 languages; Book Dash, Room to Read’s Literacy Cloud, and others, all house many open-source children’s books produced by local and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) as well as development projects.

For step two it has recommended that the teacher/instructor check the copyright agreement of the selected books. The titles in the global digital libraries listed are registered under the Creative Commons (CC) 4.0 International Attribution (CC BY 4.0) licence. This means you can share, adapt, and translate the books with attribution to the original content creator or publisher. Local publishers can also use these books to jump-start the process of creating high-quality children’s books in relevant languages.

The recommendation for the third step is that technical advice be sought if large-scale printing is required (more than a few thousand copies). Books on platforms other than the Early Literacy Resource Network will require additional pre-press work to be ready for large-scale printing. All CC BY-licensed books and many books licensed with other types of CC licences can be adapted for large-scale printing. The Read@Home programme is developing guidance on how to do this.

The fourth step is creating or versioning new books using software. Some of the global platforms mentioned above include software to easily version books (see, for instance,
StoryWeaver Translator or the
African Storybook Maker app). If you are producing books with government or donor funding, the World Bank recommends that the books be CC BY licensed and shared on one of the global platforms. This ensures that public funding is used for the greatest possible public good.

The final step surrounds transparency and effective mechanisms to procure book printing and distribution to get affordable, well-designed books into children’s hands on time.

It is clear that more hands are needed in the fight against illiteracy.

Wayne Campbell

waykam@yahoo.com