Recently in Libraries Category

FAVL intern Anne-Reed Angino spent a couple months in Sierra Leone in October-November on a "scoping mission" to see where FAVL might best be able to contribute to development of village libraries in the country... We're working up an action plan, but in the meantime here are links to her photos of the libraries she visited.  (That is Kenema Regional Library, above, a government-run library.)  Also the libraries she was able to identify are now mapped on our Google Map of public libraries in Africa.  More coming soon.

Also, below is an extract from a blog by Clare, at Adventures in International Development, on one of the few small village library projects in the country, that impressed Anne-Reed (and me to, second-hand)... it is run by a local organization, cdpeace, and they are doing a great job.

I can't believe that somehow I have not yet written a post specifically about the Mapaki community library. Many of my evenings in Mapaki so far have been spent in the library. The library is open Monday to Friday evenings, from 7:30 - 9:30, or until the battery, charged during the day by the solar panel, runs out of juice, whichever comes first. If it's raining the library doesn't open, and if it is open, the kids usually scatter for home at the first hint of raindrops. The library here is really quite incredible (a few photos here: http://picasaweb.google.ca/clarepoulev/MapakiLibrary02#, although they don't really do it justice!), and is already known about quite widely in the country. The library is so popular that the younger children have to be limited to one visit per week (Grades 1 - 5 on Monday to Friday evenings). The older children (Grades 6 and JSS students) and adults can come any evening. On any given night there could be 15 - 30 people in the library. Young kids looking at books, older kids studying or doing homework, volunteer teachers looking at teaching resources, and adults from the community reading or having a computer lesson. I often go with a book and just read in the electric light. Sometimes I bring my computer and do a bit of work, although this tends to attract a lot of attention :-)

A very sad article from The Graphic in Ghana.. the three village libraries supported by FAVL apparently see more users and encourage more reading than Accra Library!

80 Per Cent Of Books At Accra Library Outdated Date:27th July 2009 It is estimated that about 80 per cent of the books at the Accra Regional Library at the Ghana Library Board is outdated. "Most of the books we have in the library are as old as the library itself," the Regional Librarian, Mr Adjei Apenteng, told the Daily Graphic. He said restocking of the library had been done in the past by the government and the Ghana Education Trust Fund (GETFund), adding that although others used to donate to the board, they had stopped, leaving the government and the GETFund alone to support it. According to him, the library had initiated moves to get computerised as part of the efforts to bring it up to standard. Mr Apenteng noted that patronage of the library was poor and that it was only during examination time that patronage shot up. "Even with that people come with their own materials to read. People doing professional examinations also utilise the facility," he said. Statistics made available to the Daily Graphic indicate that while 221 people registered in 2006, 179 registered in 2007, with 143 registering in 2008. In addition, 3,187 books were borrowed in 2006, while 2,768 and 2,032 were borrowed in 2007 and 2008, respectively. Mr Apenteng said as part of efforts to encourage reading in schools, the Ghana Library Board had started piloting the mobile library system under which vans with books moved to schools. He said the mobile library system, which collapsed about 25 years ago, was being piloted in the 10 regions to whip up the interest of reading in children. He said the board was using vans provided by UNESCO and could expand the services if it owned more vans. He said sometimes the board bought books to stock the library but noted that some of the people who patronised the library pilfered the books. He urged parents to encourage their children to read. Mr Apenteng also encouraged district assemblies to establish libraries at the local level.

FAVL's partner, Under the Reading Tree, has posted an enjoyable and well-made video capturing the activities at the Mpigi Community library in Uganda! Take a look!

Read UTRT's blog post about the library and the video here.

Apparently being supported by Oakville Library in Canada. See their flickr photos...

From librarian Jennifer's monthly report on the library, explaining why visitors at night hours were lower:

The major problem that occurred in community was a curfew from which every member of the community was to stay indoors after five o'clock simply because a member of the community has been accuse of being a wizard and was beaten to death. As a result the law was then taking its course which the police were then arresting and person found outside after 5pm.

FAVL hosts the occasional workshop- it is a necessary part of any enterprise, and the issue is when is it taken to excess. (Many of my university colleagues know what I mean!) I found the following paragraphs from Susan Watkins and Ann Swidler particularly blunt:

(i) Training and the ‘‘Workshop Mentality”
In Malawi as elsewhere Sub-Saharan Africa, the supply of
‘‘training” has created a huge demand. In an incisive analysis
of family planning programs in Nigeria, Daniel Jordan Smith
(2003) has described the ‘‘workshop mentality,” arguing that
training and workshops provide the ideal intersection of donor
and recipient interests. Donors can believe they are doing something
self-renewing by providing training, while workshop facilitators
can build their patronage ties by providing access to the
per diems, travel allowances, and opportunities for networking
that workshops provide. But we argue that the predominance of
‘‘training” as a core donor-sponsored activity also arises from
the constraints of the sustainability doctrine. If donors are supposed
to help, but without funding substantive programs that
could breed dependency, then training and workshops are the
ideal donor-funded activity: experts will teach people skills, or
better yet teach them to teach skills, which will provide all with
the capacity to provide for their own needs.

The logic of sustainability reinforces the interstitial elites’
commitment to esoteric knowledge. If funders will not finance
substantive projects (VCT, nutrition supplements, paid healthcare
workers, paid teachers or counselors) on an on-going basis
because they would not be sustainable, then ‘‘training” is
one of the only fundable activities. And what is all that training
to consist of? Since the training is in some ways an end in
itself for both donors and those trained, the content of the
training becomes elaborate formalizations of what would
otherwise be common sense.

Swidler, A., & Watkins, S.C., ‘‘Teach a Man to Fish”: The Sustainability Doctrine and Its ..., World Development (2009), doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2008.11.002

I will add that a refrain that I hear myself repeating to a lot to potential library funders etc is, "It's not that hard to run a village library... a week working in one of our libraries is enough to get all the basic skills for administration." The harder part- storytelling, leading book discussions, imparting the love of reading, animation- is probably better imparted through one-on-one that through a formal workshop. Lots of learning by doing is needed.

Kate Parry writes:

One of the Uganda Community Library Association’s members, Michael Oguttu, has written the following account of his own motives in setting up a community library at Bugiri. I have visited it, and at present it has little to offer, while the need is evidently enormous. At the same time, it’s a shining example of the kind of local initiative that UgCLA is trying to encourage. Michael himself is the librarian of another UgCLA member library, Inforall, in Kampala.

From: Oguttu Michael [mailto:micoguttu@yahoo.com]
Sent: Monday, April 13, 2009 5:07 PM
To: kateparry@earthlink.net

BUGIRI COMMUNITY LIBRARY

Background:
After working for a community in Kampala, I realized how important libraries are to the promotion of reading culture, literacy and development and also improvement of education performance in the world. This also made me believe that books/information materials or information can change/improve the ways of living. From the fact that I studied from my home district(Bugiri) Uganda, where there are so many private schools and only few government owned schools. Most of the schools have no libraries and only few have books which are kept in books, which actually limit children/students access to books. Most of the teachers don’t have access to textbooks-this means that they only use the notes they copied during their study/school days, and yet the syllabus changes which has or is leading to poor performance in education sector in most rural schools. Another fact is that the income of rural based families is so low and they can not manage to buy text books for their children, this is also proved by many parents failing to pay school fees which have led to many school drop-outs in Bugiri and Uganda at large. Not forgetting that even if the government introduced universal primary and secondary education (UPE and USE) respectively, many children/students are not going to schools due to failure by parents to buy only scholastic materials which is due to poor states in families. Although I got the interest of helping my home district/nation by establishing a community library, I didn’t wakeup one day morning and put it in place. But it was a gradual process.

STAGE 1
I started by saving some of the money from my little allowances I got.
STAGE 2
In July 2008, I attended the workshop of people who were eager to establish a community library in their local areas which was organized by Uganda community libraries association (UgCLA).after which I learnt skills of how to start and run a community library.
STAGE 3
And it was from there that I got the courage to go and talk to the leaders in Bugiri district, residents, and my family members who all welcomed the idea. But their major worry was where the funds will come from. But I answered them that all will be solved. And now the library is operating helping both children and adults.

I believe that, ‘there is nothing good like serving my others in need’.

Mr. Oguttu Michael
Founder
micoguttu@yahoo.com
bugiricomu.lib@gmail.com
+256 75 1 935 054.

(Photo:
The Bugiri Community Library. Michael Oguttu, the founder, is on the right, in the back row, and the librarian, whom he pays from his own salary, is in front. Also in the back row is Michael's brother, who works as library assistant - and all the others are children who were playing around the front of the library and whom the library hopes to serve. )

Kim Dionne sends a link to an interesting but too brief short article from a library friend from Zimbabwe who tried to start a library in his home village.

This (if it had succeeded) would have been the first ever library in Ruwa and Zimre Park 30 kms East of Harare. I could envision how this small step in the right direction was going to change the educational landscape in this area one child at a time. However this was the beginning of the end for the project as my contact ran into bureaucratic hurdles that are typical of our African culture and politics. The local councilor had to be involved, and the Member of Parliament for the whole district, the Education Ministry officials all the way down to the Zanu Pf youth league. It saddened me to know that although none of these people were paying a dime for the project they denied every poor child in the area a life long chance to read a book and improve themselves in their educational pursuit. Needless to say even their kids were going to benefit. These fat cats wanted to be associated with the project obviously for political gain. The books are now sitting at my friend’s house, and I hope his kids and their friends are reading them.

The politics and obstacles are all too real, but I do not see any lessons being drawn in how to go about doing things differently. It occurs to me that maybe one reason for "failure" (a word I intensely dislike when talking about development projects) is that there may have been too much talk, too much setting up expectations, and too little action. That is, if the books had been sent to the friend's house, and the friend had simply opened a room for reading, and hired a local secondary school student to sit and be the librarian, monitoring use, I wonder whether there would have been any opposition? The library would have been started, to no great fanfare. This is actually a lesson I take deep to heart. Although many of our libraries open with some ceremony, with visits from the U.S. Ambassador, myself and the local FAVL team know these are potential dangerous "shutdown" moments. So in general we eschew ceremonies and such, and try to just get on with day-to-day business, and not ruffle any local political feathers. Low profile, is the lesson.

Check it out- they just started and it has a nice look and so far very interesting postings... excerpt here...

We were further encouraged when we visited a couple of schools INFORALL has been working on ’sensitizing’ about reading. We toured St. Jared’s Secondary School, attended by 250 local students, some of which are boarders from further away. While many of the students eyes glazed over when we asked them about INFORALL’s library, we met with a very enthusiastic Information Club, with a couple of dozen members. Michael, INFORALL’s librarian, has been working with these students to make them aware of the library and its resources as well as encourage them to study, learn and write together on a weekly basis.

In our discussions with the group, they asked us for funding that would allow them to publish a regular ‘magazine’ or newsletter that would feature local news, articles and other material submitted by the club’s members as well as other contributors. We couldn’t promise anything, but really appreciated their enthusiasm and are thinking we could try and find a high school in Canada that would be willing to fundraise/sponsor this small project and perhaps even enter into a semi-regular dialogue with the Information Club at St. Jared’s.

Sudan is dear to my heart, and why shouldn't a network of community libraries get started there? We'll start a Ning network page soon.

Dear colleagues

I am pleased to inform you that yesterday, April 1, a public community
library was opened in Mundri town. This public library was made possible
through the generous contribution of the local community of Mundri.

The fund for the construction of Mundri Community Library was raised locally
on 20-26 September 2008. In that period of one week, Mundri Relief &
Development Association (MRDA) organised young volunteers who moved
house-to-house in Mundri and Kotobi to collect money and in-kind
contribution. The community fund raising initiative raised SDG 14,777 in
cash and SDG 6,863 in pledges. We used part of that money (SDG 3,500) to
renovate a clinic for under 5 children in Mundri PHCC and the rest to
construct and furnish the community library, which was opened yesterday. The
under five clinic was opened on October 6, 2009 and is doing very well.

I am pleased that a dedicated group of young women and men have toiled hard
and we now have in Mundri Town a centre of learning and culture for all
people. Unfortunately, we don't have enough books in the library. We bought
some books (worth SDG 1,465) but this is not enough. When we opened the
library yesterday most of the selves were empty!

Do you have any book that you could donate to Mundri Community Library? We
are looking for books for young readers - both school children and out of
school youth. We would also appreciate books for general readers. UN/NGO
publications are welcome. If you are in Juba and you would like to provide
books for Mundri Community Library please drop them to Trudy van Ommeren,
who has kindly accepted to collect books for the library. Trudy works with
ICCO as Programme Manager of Capacity Assessment and Development Programme
(CADEP). You can reach Trudy on trudyvanommeren@yahoo.co.uk or +249 126 148
560. We will arrange to transport the books from Juba to Mundri.

If you need more information about the Mundri Community Library or want to
know more about MRDA and the work we do, please contact me on the addresses
below.

I look forward to hearing from you

Kennet Korayi
Director, MRDA
PO Box 339, Juba, SUDAN