A message from Casey.  He and the Leo librarian did a training with FAVL staff at Bereba library... will be something to continue to follow!

Hello everyone,

I've attached some pictures of our library opening last week as well as some general pictures of the library.  There will be more to come very soon.  I would again like to thank everyone for your contribution and support in making this library a reality for our community.


Regards,

Casey Kean
Peace Corps Volunteer
Leo, Burkina Faso

HT: Stephanie Wessels

As I searched through archives of the best music in 2009, I came across this NPR play-list titled "Desert Rock and 21st-Century Traditions: New Sounds from Africa in 2009." I must say I have had this play-list on repeat for the past month.  My favorite song is from a Toureg band named Tinariwen with a fascinating history, the song is titled "Tenhert." The rest of the artists and songs included are equally impressive.
 

In response to our post, Olugbemisola Rhuday-Perkovich posted a wonderful link on the African Village Libraries Ning Network forum that is definitely worth sharing.  It is an interview with the Ivorian author Margurite Abouet about her graphic novel series, Aya.  Abouet has also founded a literacy organization, "Des Livres Pour Tous" which has opened a library in Abidjan to support literacy education for children who don't normally have access to books. 

I particularly loved her answer to the following question:

What were the 'turning points' for you as a young reader? What literature do you continue to treasure? What made you think?
I have always treasured the stories that my maternal grandfather told me around the fire during the holidays in the village. All of those stories in our oral tradition were rich, imaginative accounts of mythology, wonderful tales. He taught me to pay attention to what occurred around me, to listen to the stories, and then become a storyteller. These stories of the Ivory Coast provided fertile ground for my imagination. Then when I arrived in Paris, I discovered the libraries and I started to devour all kinds of literature. The 4 girls of Doctor March, Agatha Christie, Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Shakespeare, Maurice Leblanc, Jules Romain, Welles, were my favourites at that time. I loved to read mysteries and try to guess at the culprit in the first pages of the story.

Read more here...
 
I am definitely putting Aya on my list of things to read!  It looks like a feature-length animated film adaptation of Aya is in the works for 2011.  I can't wait!  Thanks Olugbemisola!

She's interviewed at this amazing website that is reviewing 28 African-American children's book authors for Black History Month...

Stories help us examine and shape the world we live in. Stories give us hopeful answers and insights to questions no one person can answer on their own -- stories help us share our lives. This is what I love about being a writer.

So says Jerdine Nolen-wife, mother of two, educator, school administrator, and author of numerous picture book titles, at least 11 of which are currently in print: Harvey Potter's Balloon Farm, In My Momma's Kitchen, Raising Dragons, Big Jabe, Plantzilla, Plantzilla Goes to Camp, Hewitt Anderson's Great Big Life, Max and Jax in Second Grade, Lauren McGill's Pickle Museum, Thunder Rose...and her latest, Pitching in for Eubie (Amistad/HarperCollins).

I don't think I was ever bored as a child.  I was always making up games.  I enjoyed the company of my dolls or my little toy lamb, and I enjoyed my own company.  Among some of the other things I did to amuse myself, I collected words.  I collected words because I liked the way certain words sounded, what they meant, how they made me laugh because they sounded so silly.  And I loved putting words together.  

My mother noticed this tendency in me and gave me a hand with my deep and abiding desire.  She gave me an empty cardboard cigar box.  Then we made what would be the equivalent of index cards (the cardboard from my dad's shirts from the dry cleaner, cut to size).  Because I loved the sounds of words, some of them would give me a tickle.  And certain words-words like "chutney" or "cucumber" or "watermelon"-- these food words would crack me up just to say them.  Words I thought sounded mighty silly, I wrote down on my makeshift index cards and kept them in my empty cigar box.  It was my great treasure.  If I ever needed to be entertained, or have a big belly laugh, I would look at my word supply. And I laughed a lot.  Sometimes I played with the rhyme and rhythm or cadence of the words, too. It was fun.  I mean it was really a lot of fun.  I know what you're thinking...and that's o.k. because you had to be there to see just how fun it was!!!!!  :o) 

I want her to come and be a teacher in San Jose!!!

I wonder how many of the guys in camouflage read Ahmadou Kourouma in their spare time...

Lucas Amikiya, FAVL regional coordinator in Ghana, in front of Sumbrungu library.  The funny anecdote about these books (and we are very grateful to Jim Kouzes and Barry Posner for the donation) is that when they were coming through customs, the agent looked through the box, and grabbed a copy of "The Leadership Challenge" and looked Lucas straight in the eye, and said, "This one is for me."  Poor Lucas, what could he do?  But we had a great laugh about the corrupt customs agent who wants to be a leader.  Yeah, right.  Let's see what he says after reading the book!

Why not... a blog entry with a picture of me taking a Flip camera video of Dounko thanking people who donated stickers so that kids in Burkina Faso, Uganda, Tanzania and Ghana get excited about coming to the village library and read a lot... see, I'm not a Luddite.

We've been revising the photography books produced in Burkina Faso through our Reading West Africa study abroad program, organized through Santa Clara University.  The books made by the students, in the course of a class with photography professor David Pace, are now online.  To see previews of all the books click link right here.

I finally got to read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's first novel, Purple Hibiscus.  Definitely not for the younger child...a frightening, almost Gothic, tale of family dysfunction... the father, Eugene, is so repressed by inner-demons that he demands Christian perfection from his two children and wife, while struggling, as successful businessman and newspaper owner, against the collapsing Nigeria of military coups and riots.  The narrator, Kambili, is a nuanced and sensitive girl, coming of age, slowly realizing that the fear she experiences at home is not normal, but dreadfully wrong.  There are flaws in the novel: some of the adult characters are flat and/or overdrawn, and the ending is, well, somehow the novel had to end, so Adichie decided to end with a bang.  A great novel for the plane ride to Burkina Faso... or a set of evenings at home. 

From Sumaila Isah Umaisha,Literary Editor of New Nigerian Newspapers, Kaduna, Nigeria, and everythinliterature blogger, an interview with Wale Okediran ...

HON. WALE OKEDIRAN, the immediate past President of Association of Nigerian Authors, ANA, has just completed a fictional account of his tenure as a member of the Federal House of Representatives from 2004 to 2007. Titled Tenants of the House, it was originally conceived as a biography but had to be fictionalised in view of its very sensitive and potentially explosive contents. In this interview with Sumaila Umaisha, he discusses the book and its public presentation at the Nigerian Institute of International Affairs, Lagos.

NNW: What is Tenants of the House all about?
Hon. Wale Okediran: It is a fictional account of my stay in the House of Representatives from 2004 to 2007. It traced the experience of the main character Hon. Samuel Bakura while in the National Assembly and depicted his challenges, frustrations and achievements as an idealistic young politician.

You stated in the press material that Tenants of the House is politically explosive. How will this explosiveness help heal Nigeria's checkered political experience?
The way it will help will depend on how people react to it.The writer's job is to write and not to prescribe. My aim is to sensitise the public about the challenges and frustrations of governing this country from the perspective of a former insider, albeit in a fictional way. The story will also let the public know that contrary to widely held belief, the problem in our governorship does not solely lie with the politicians, but also to some extent with some of the electorate who expect too much from their elected representatives, and by so doing, put them in difficult positions.

It is my hope that with this understanding, the electorate will be more vigilant in electing the right people into office and monitor them more closely while in office. In addition, more credible people will be willing to go into politics and increase the critical mass of those who want to change the country for good.
....

We however still have a long way to go in the area of Libraries which are still non existing in many parts of the country. One is looking forward to a situation where every Local Government Area in the country will have a functional library. It is not too much for philanthropists to also set up libraries.

I just finished teaching a class this week on the natural resource curse, and had my students read a paper by Jensen and Wantchekon, on the relationship between natural resources and democracy/governance in Africa.  The paper is a decent introduction to the topic, but I use it to illustrate a deeply flawed regression analysis.  Today I was browsing the past week of postings at AidWatch, and guess what? Their guest poster agrees with me. 

An oil purse is a curse, of course?  Published February 2, 2010 This post is by Adam Martin, a post-doctoral fellow at DRI.

In development economics everyone knows that natural resources are a curse. A well-known study by Sachs and Warner found a negative correlation between resource abundance and growth rates, while subsequent studies have shown a negative relationship with democracy. The Curse enjoys wide appeal. Aid skeptics like that it implicates oppressive domestic government and nationalized industries. Aid supporters are drawn to its emphasis on geography (destiny!) and the indictment of global markets. And on the popular level, no one makes a better villain than oil companies. But popularity doesn't stop the story from being hot, flat, and wrong.

New research argues that empirical work on the Curse suffers from two interrelated problems. First, it uses dependence (the share of GDP from that resource) and calls it abundance (the stock of a resource in the ground). But dependence in turn depends on institutional quality--if you have sound institutions, natural resources take their place along other industries. If not, natural resources will by default constitute a large share of GDP because poor institutions stifle an advanced division of labor. When you look at cross-sectional data using dependence as a proxy for abundance, it will look like natural resources compromise institutional quality.

To read more see link above...

At the workshop: Discussing the story with the reader

(who is Mrs Eva Barongo, Director of
the Uganda Children's Writers' and Illustrators' Association, and former
Children's Librarian for the Kampala Public Library).

Elisee writes (in late January):
J'ai  fait patir ce samedi, le bibliothécaire de Pobe pour son stage  a Bereba . Il s'appelle Amidou Konfé.  Il est accompagne de Sawadogo Adama le président du comité de gestion qui voudrait aussi voir a quoi ressemble dit-il, une bibliothèque de village et rencontrer si possible le comité d'un village. Dounko se chargera d'organiser tout ceci.  Adama revient aujourd'hui a Ouaga, Emilie voudrait que j'achète des livres avec lui afin qu'il puisse les ramener a Pobe.

UgCLA workshop, Jan. 27, 2010. Children listening to a story -- adults
behind seeing how to read aloud.

The guy is incredible... On his blog, the video above embedded, and text as follows:

Il est 23 heures, je fais une courte virée a l'imprimerie d'un ami. Une imprimerie sans nom ! Dans le jargon nous appelons ça "Djona-Djona ko" (affaire rapide) ou encore " mogo-ma-mogo-wélé" (personne n'a fait appel à personne) ; tout ceci pour dire qu'il n'y a pas grande possibilité pour le client de se plaindre de la qualite du travail ! Mais généralement le travail sort impeccable : T.I.A ! Le machiniste - en débardeur blanc - est un contractuel venu prêter main forte à mon pote. Comme tous les machinistes de Ouaga, il travail les nuits pour arrondir ses fins du mois. DeBawaya

People involved in community and school library projects in rural Africa know, from visiting them, that there are plenty of "libraries" (cupboards, shelves, one room affairs full of dust, closets packed full of Texas Board of Education cast-offs) that even a glance tells you have no effect on the reading population that is the target for the library.  But more often the impact is intermediate, and a glance will not suffice.  So how to tell whether the library is having an impact?  And what if the donor demands that you have an impact assessment plan?  What should you include?  Here is my first cut of presenting library impact.

1. Photos.  If you don't have a picture of the library, with users reading books, then get one.  Then plan on how you are going to get one or two more photos every couple months.  I think a photo like this one speaks for itself, especially in a library that has been around for a few years and a blog site is steadily posting pictures like this.   Anyone can fake statistics, but in a village setting it is pretty hard to repeatedly fake pictures like this by opening the library once a month and posing kids reading.  Obviously it can be done- remember the faked moon landing?
   
2. Testimony from "neutral" visitors.  Every six months or so someone should be visiting the library to make sure that it has the appearance of functioning.  If your visitor clearly finds a library obviously locked and no librarian, it is unlikely to be having an impact.  The surest test is whether while visiting the library someone comes in and acts as if coming in were normal (rather than asking "What is this place?").  When I was visiting Sara library last fall, in Burkina Faso, a gendarme came in to return a book by Ahmadou Kourouma, and then grabbed another to check out.  I chatted with him a bit... he checked out a novel a week... all he did as a gendarme was sit by the side of the road watching traffic and waiting for trouble...  Did I need to measure how reading the books was "impacting" his life?  Did I worry that maybe the librarian had paid him to "fake it"?  No.  Reading Ahmadou Kourouma can't be faked.  Look to see whether kids walk in and grab a book.  if they do, then clearly they are used to the place.  Village kids are generally very shy around formal structures like libraries, and it takes a while for them to feel comfortable.  Do they take off their shoes at the door?  Do they lower the tone of their voices?  Great signs that they are used to the place.
   
3. Monthly librarian reports.  The first obvious requirement for measuring impact.  According to the librarian, how many readers does the library receive broken down by age and gender.  How many books are checked out, if a lending library?  How many kids attended library-sponsored activities like reading circles or quiz contests?
4. Focus group with local community members.  Your neutral visitor might also sit down and talk with a medium sized group- maybe the schoolteachers, maybe community leaders, maybe a women's group.  Given enough time and some credibility (by having a local guide as companion), the discussion that ensues will tell a lot about the library functioning.  Does someone actually have a story about a kid who studies a lot in the library and then passed an exam?  If so, you are good to go!
   
5. Survey of the local community.  If you have a small budget and some local university-level manpower, then you can think of doing a user-satisfaction survey.  With help from schoolteachers, you can have kids in 4th grade and up fill out questionnaires.  What were the last three books they read?  Do they use the library? Do they know the name of the librarian?  Can they articulate how the library has helped them?
6. Comparative survey.  Compare reading patterns etc. between kids in the village with the library to kids in "matching" villages without libraries.  This is the first cut attempt to see differences, but of course is fraught with what social scientists call selection bias- maybe you located the library in a community where kids were already reading well; or the opposite, you located the library in the most disadvantaged community.  In either case, the straight comparison will be biased by the pre-existing conditions that are hard to capture and control for.  Same goes for a pre-library and post-library survey or results of reading test.  Lots of things change in a village over time- a new school director, different teachers, etc. might confound the effects of the library on reading.
7. Randomized experimental impact assessment.  If you have a million dollars, then you can establish 50 libraries in a randomly selected group of villages, and not establish villages in another 50 control villages, and then compare the differences after ten years.  Yeah right.
8. Randomly assess reading programs.  This is more feasible, since you can allocate different kids to different reading programs sponsored by the library, and see which programs are cost-effective.  One important caveat- anyone can improve reading with one on one tutoring for six months... so the reading program should be designed to be realistic in terms of costs, and not rely on presence of expensive managers or consultants.  And the costs have to be measured.  A program that costs $100 per kid may produce a 10% improvement in scores, and another program than costs $10 per kid produces a 2% increase in scores.... which is to be recommended?
   

Just got a call from Hesperian Publishers; they are sending 33 copies of their Where there is no doctor series to the community libraries in Ghana.  These are quickly becoming the "must-read" books in the communities served by the libraries, so this is fantastic to be able to extend to other local libraries.

Lecture assidue dans la bibliothèque de Béréba, en préparation d'un petit concours de mots-croisés organisé par Zomizou le nouveau bibliothécaire. Chacun de ces enfants va puiser le maximum de savoir dans son livre préféré ; car c'est le moment de  se familiariser avec les mots afin d'être plus efficace pour le concours.

Merd, why can't I be in Paris... a whole weekend of African graphic noveling...

vendredi 5 février : la bande dessinée africaine : réalités et perspectives

Sous la coordination scientifique de Christophe Cassiau-Haurie, conservateur de bibliothèque, spécialiste de la BD du sud (Afrique, Océan indien, Caraïbes...) qui sera le modérateur de la journée.

introduction : état des lieux de la BD africaine par Christophe Cassiau-Haurie

intervenants :

• Robert Wazi, éditeur de bandes dessinées
• Alix Fuilu, auteur et éditeur (Afrobulles)
• Serge Diantantu, auteur
• Christophe Ngalle Edimo, scénariste
• Sabri Kasbi auteur et enseignant
• Jean-Louis Couturier, rédacteur en chef des revues Planète Jeunes et Planète Enfants (Bayard Presse) : revues diffusées en Afrique
• Alain Brezault, journaliste, scénariste et écrivain
• Joost Pollmann, et journaliste de BD au quotidien Volkskrant, commissaire de l'exposition Picha,

On January 26-27 UgCLA conducted its fifth workshop for all of it member libraries. For the first time the workshop was hosted by one of the members: Kabubbu Community Library, which, thanks to generous support from the UK, is not only unusually well built and well stocked but is associated with a village conference centre with facilities for meetings and accommodation for guests. It's a great place and considerably cheaper than a hotel. We were joined for the workshop by two friends from abroad: Sarah Switzer, who is working for Under the Reading Tree in Tanzania, and Katie Uher, who represents Ready for Reading in Rwanda. They are doing great work in their respective countries, and they were a great help at our workshop too.

The workshop was funded by a grant promised by Pockets of Change (POC), a small donor organization in New York. POC has offered to fund the purchase of ten sets of children's books (valued at $200 each) to be distributed to libraries on the basis of proposals that they will be writing over the next month; then in August it will fund another workshop at which the recipient libraries will report on their experiences with the books. So the theme of the workshop was "Working with Children," and we prepared for it by purchasing the initial $200 set - actually, we found that after spending slightly less than that we had accumulated a representative, if not comprehensive, collection of the children's books available in Uganda. The exercise made us aware of two salient issues: most of the books are highly didactic, and there are very few picture books available (we are also aware that there are nowhere near enough books in local languages, but for this purpose we were focusing on English books since we don't know in which parts of the country the recipient libraries will be).
Altogether, we got about 100 volumes, including a range of traditional and modern story books as well as books with advice and information on health and social issues. The first session was spent in a World Café format, with the participants moving from one set of books to another and discussing them. Then we had two sessions on reading aloud with younger and with older children (our hosts at Kabubbu imported some children for the purpose), and the last session that day focused on displaying books for children to read by themselves and on setting up programs to encourage them to do so.

Next day there were presentations from four different member libraries about projects they had carried out to involve adults in reading with children, and the final session was about developing a proposal for using the books, to be presented to POC. The proposals must be written by Feb. 28. POC will help us to select the winners, and then we'll have a further meeting with the managers of these libraries to give them the books and to make sure that appropriate systems of evaluation and reporting are in place.

The workshop was better attended than ever, with more than forty libraries represented, and, as has become usual by now, everyone participated enthusiastically. Some of the members were new, for UgCLA has been joined by more than ten new libraries recently (bringing our total membership to 55), but the new people fit in well and some were especially active. Everyone stayed for the Annual General Meeting, which was the last event of the day, and there were not even any complaints when we announced a rise in our annual subscription from 20,000 to 30,000 Uganda shillings (from about $10 to $15). Somehow or other we seem to have hit on a winning formula here in Uganda, and we look forward to seeing the proposals for the Children's Book Project.

Kate Parry
Chair, UgCLA
Executive Director for East Africa, FAVL
4 February 2010

I recently finished Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimanada Adichie.  Definitely the kind of sprawling saga that people of all reading levels enjoy.  The setting is the Biafran war for independence.  Easy to imagine the book becoming the basis for an "imagined community" and it is interesting to see how Adichie conjures the Igbo sense of imagined community before the war.  The poet plays a role; songs play a role; a bearded military man... but the Igbo nation is really tied together by an oral history of significant places and communities.  No novels shaped the community.  But I'm a natural-born critic, so rather than praise too much, I'll point out shortcomings.  I found many of the character overdrawn.  There.  That's it.  Good novel.  Overdrawn characters + potboiler.  Great for an airplane trip.

Of course, the real critics have their very interesting observations that make me wish I had pursued that line of work... "The nature of the Igbo traveling identity-its cosmopolitanism, transborder claims, and new metropolitan tropes-permits us therefore to fully comprehend the nature of Nigeria's contemporary cultural production as well as its implication or significance in shaping modern, postcolonial Nigerian identity and the direction of its narrative of the nation."  That from Nwakanma Obi, "Metonymic Eruptions : Igbo Novelists, the Narrative of the Nation, and New Developments in the Contemporary Nigerian Novel" Research in African literatures , 2008, vol. 39, n^o2, pp. 1-14.

Peace Corp volunteer Emilie Crofton's has posted a nice video of the Pobe Mengao Library on her blog.

Elliot loved this graphic novel, about the difficulties of being different in an American high school.  Since he is just starting middle school, the resonance was probably deep.

Uganda Community Libraries Association workshop, Jan. 28, 2010. Summarizing the previous day's work. The facilitator is Christine Sempebwa, Director of Ka Tutandike, and Vice-Chair
of UgCLA.

Lucas Amikiya, FAVL/CESRUD coordinator in Ghana, visited Jordan Nu community library, a FAVL affiliated library, which has been generously supported over the years by Marilyn Deer.  During his stay, teachers from the primary school came to the library for a library classes. The librarian helped them understand the rules of the library, and helped one of the students to read a storybook.

"Libraries are critical information providers and part of their function is to make information policies. The policies that they adopt on the selection, organization and dissemination of the information they possess determine, in large part, their effectiveness... Sierra Leone's attempt at attaining socio-economic objectives in her post-war period is basically an information proposition. Her successful participation in inter national trade negotiations, finance, good governance, gender and human rights activities, to cite but a few examples, which involve national interest, depends significantly on her information power. This is why the issue of policies on library and information management should be viewed with utmost seriousness and pursued with zest and diligence."

John Kargbo and Anne-Reed at Fourah Bay College in Freetown, November 2009

The libraries in Boni and Dimikuy are testing grounds for improving perception of the library by adult women in the villages... so we are trying a number of programs to get them to come with their daughters.  It is easy to daydream about schoolchildren reading to their non-literate parents, who beam with pride, and maybe learn to read themselves.  Reality is far messier and harder.  We will keep you posted on what kinds of programs work, at low cost (anybody can do anything with $600 per person, right Millennium Village Project?)

Here's some photos from regional animator Sanou Dounko's latest effort, a storytelling time for mothers and daughters...

Seems like a really interesting paper...

Allocation of Labor in Urban West Africa: Insights from the Pattern of Labor Supply and Skill Premiums

Authors: Dimova, Ralitza; Nordman, Christophe J; Roubaud, François

Source: Review of Development Economics, Volume 14, Number 1, February 2010 , pp. 74-92(19)

 

Abstract:

Using comparable data from five West African capitals, we assess the rationale behind development policies targeting high rates of school enrollment through the prism of allocation of labor and earnings effects of skills across the formal and informal sectors, and not working. We find that people with high levels of education allocate to the small formal sector, while less educated workers allocate to the informal sector. While high levels of education are given more value in the relatively smaller sectors of salaried employment, observed skills like education appear to be fairly unprofitable in the larger self-employment sector. The fact that only the small formal sector in urban West Africa both seems to absorb highly educated workers and provide high skill premiums may be an important reason for the observed low demand for education and high dropout rates.