A d d r e s s : 1 4 t h F l o o r , R e n n i e H o u s e , 1 9 A m e s h o f f S t r e e t , B r a a m f o n t e i n

P o s t a l A d d r e s s : P O B o x 3 1 8 2 2 , B r a a m f o n t e i n , 2 0 1 7 , S o u t h A f r i c a

E - m a i l : i n f o @ s a i d e . o r g . z a U R L : h t t p : / / w w w . s a i d e . o r g . z a

I n t e r n a t i o n a l t e l : + 2 7 1 1 4 0 3 2 8 1 3

THE AFRICAN STORYBOOK INITIATIVE: ANNUAL REPORT FOR 2015

IntroductionThe 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 to proceed to the next level of schooling. It is generally acknowledged that one of the key reasons for these low literacy levels is the shortage of appropriate storybooks for early reading in languages familiar to the young African child. There is a vicious cycle that prevents the publishing of literature for children and adults in Africa at the moment. Because there is very little reading material, children do not learn to read well or enjoy reading. There is therefore no demand for books. If there is no demand, publishers will not invest in producing books (particularly African language books) to support children learning to read.

The African Storybook initiative (ASb) aims to contribute to the improvement of literacy among African children by intervening positively in this vicious cycle. The purpose of the ASb is not only to provide storybooks in the range of languages needed by young African children as they are learning to read. It is also to do so through a publishing model that ensures that growing numbers of storybooks are available to teachers, parents and librarians as needed, without having to consider the size and buying power of the market for a particular language.

During 2015, we refined the vision for our contribution: Open access to children’s picture storybooks in the languages of Africa, for children’s literacy, enjoyment and imagination. However, our strategies remained constant:

1. A website with tools for translation and adaptation and creation of openly licensed stories.

2. Story development from and in the contexts of final use.

3. Pilot sites in pilot countries to test delivery methods, website access and story use by the intended target audience. (This year saw the end of our sustained support to the pilot sites.)

Trustees M r S Mas lom oney (Co-Cha irman) Dr S J R am okgopa (Co-Cha irman) Mr D A d le r Ms M Metca l f e P ro f S M ot a la Ms L V i l akaz i -T se l an e Directo r Ms JA G l enn ie Registrat ion T rus t 13 55 /9 2 NPO 0 41 - 13 7

4. Nurturing of partners in our pilot countries and elsewhere who will use the stories and contribute to the website by creating, translating, adapting and commenting on stories.

5. Systemic implementation efforts (getting books into schools and into teacher education programmes) to test implications for scaling up.

A description of the major outputs for 2015 follows.

Releases of the project website The major development work on the site in 2015 was to plan and create a responsive site – so that the site can be read with equal ease on different devices:

Fig 1: our new responsive site

The reading component of the website is complete. Revised and simplified creation and translation tools will follow in 2016. In the process, we are following the advice of the external technical evaluator and separating out the functions of reading, creation and translation. Although this involves considerable additional back-end and front-end work, we were advised that it is essential to improve the performance of the website in low bandwidth situations and the ability of the website to deal with large numbers of users.

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In the development of a responsive site, we have improved the design and layout of the stories – brightening colours and improving the readability of the text for children learning to read. We have also integrated the blogsite (originally the communication tool for the research network) into the main site. Following the advice of our external evaluators, we will make this blog appealing not only to researchers, but also to teachers.

Stories and website use The levels of activity on the website have increased since 2014 from an average of 2900 visits per month to an average of 4840 per month peaking in November at 6269 visits. Of the visitors, 57% are from Africa – so we have reached our goal of being and remaining a website for Africa, and will continue to build on this. However, of the visitors from Africa, 91% are from our pilot countries, and in 2016 we need to ensure that we maintain visitors from these countries even though we will no longer be providing extensive support to pilot sites.

We have 1402 registered users creating and/or translating stories, and each month the number increases. The drop in visitors and registered users in early 2015 is attributable to the introduction of algorithms to remove spam registrations. See graph below: “Visitors & Registered Users”.

Fig 2: Visitors and Registered Users on the ASb site June 2014 – December 2015

We were also gratified to see that there has been a steady increase in the numbers of users accessing the website from mobile phones, particularly in Africa. Of the total of 5091 visitors in

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December, 1013 African visitors accessed the site by mobile phone, as compared to 1191 accessing it via a laptop or desktop.

In terms of storybooks, the following table shows the steady growth of stories, translations and languages, as well as images in the image bank from which users can select when they create stories. We have realised that it is important to invest in continued expansion of the image bank through commissioned high quality illustrations, but we are shifting this year from commissioning mainly South African illustrators, to illustrators in other African countries.

Table 1: Growth in ASb stories

Unique stories Translations Languages Images

3 Jun 2014 120 617 20 2608

31 Jan 2015 300 1005 30 3724

31 July 2015 421 1505 55 4385

31 Dec 2015 559 1884 66 5192

Our target for numbers of storybooks per language is 50 stories in the main languages of the pilot sites – this gives sufficient storybooks for educators to use with children for a year. As shown below, we have reached this target for all of our sites except the Lesotho site.

Table 2: Numbers of stories per language

Language # stories

1. English 507

2. Kiswahili 136

3. isiZulu 133

4. Lunyole 126

5. French 121

6. Luganda 111

7. Afrikaans 103

8. Ng’aturkana 100

9. Lugbarati 84

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Language # stories

10. isiXhosa 82

11. Oluwanga 76

12. Lumasaaba 68

13. Maa 57

14. Sepedi 56

15. Setswana 56

16. Kikamba 50

17. Lugbarati (Official) 50

18. Sesotho (Lesotho) 41

We are particularly proud that our website now has stories in 66 different languages, of which 61 are indigenous African languages. In addition, through getting more than 100 of our stories translated into French by Translators without Borders, we are facilitating Francophone African people’s access to our stories.

One of our aims is to increase the number of stories originally created in an African language. We launched the website with 120 storybooks, two thirds of which were originally in English. In 2015, of 50 accepted manuscripts, 17 (i.e. one third) were received only in English; the remaining 33 were received in English and an African language. They were published simultaneously in English and the African language; but we cannot know which language the manuscripts were originally written in – English or the African language. Although we are pleased that there are fewer manuscripts originating only in English, we also need to explore whether there are obstacles to writing stories in an African language first. We suspect that writers don’t necessarily feel confident writing in their African languages (because they acquired literacy in English or because their orthography is still in flux).

A development in 2015 has been the distinction between those stories that have passed our ‘quality check” and get the label “ASb approved’, and those community created stories or translations which have not been approved by the ASb publishing office. We allow users to search by “ASb approved,” so that the variable quality of community created stories does not put them off. To date we have “ASb approved” 966 of the 2443 stories on the website (39%). We hope to raise this percentage to 50% in 2016.

In order to keep interest high in the African Storybook initiative and maintain our reputation for contextually appropriate attractively illustrated stories, we need a steady stream of ASb approved stories, which we advertise on Facebook, Twitter, and through monthly newsflashes to our mailing

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list. We can do this in three ways: through editing and illustrating stories from pilot countries and elsewhere; through eliciting donations of illustrated stories and preparing them for publishing on our website; and through reviewing user created stories and making them “ASb approved” where merited. The second and third strategies are more cost effective, but less predictable. So we aim to keep the balance between these three strategies in a given year. There were equivalent numbers of illustrated stories donated in 2015 (69) and stories for which we commissioned illustrations (69); but there were fewer translations commissioned (302) than contributed (370). In terms of our goal, therefore, we believe that we are doing well.

Pilot site implementation Implementation in 13 of the 14 pilot sites was a major focus of 2015. As a result of non-performance, one of the sites was dropped in 2015, and the subsidy used to assist one of the well-performing sites to adopt a further satellite.

In the deliverables for 2015, we emphasized our expectation that the sites would create, translate and adapt stories online. A total of 59 stories were created, 110 translated, and 71 adapted online. The educators in the sites used a total of 370 stories from the website in their classes.

Story development workshopsOn invitation from the Kibaali Forest Schools Programme in Western Uganda, we ran a story development and translation workshop early in the year. There are 25 stories in a new language, Rutooro (a major language in Uganda), that have come out of that connection.

We co-facilitated and supported with funding a Book Dash event in Johannesburg with the Book Dash team (see http://bookdash.org/see/events/). This has yielded 12 beautifully designed and illustrated openly licensed storybooks.

In June our Kenya Country Coordinator was contracted for 10 days to run a 10 day ECD story development process for the Tanzanian Institute for Education. Although the process produced only one story for our website, it enabled us to develop a better sense of how marketable our story development services are. We also made a video to capture the process and results: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Os5yDIKWbwY.

Story development and translation workshops were also held with teacher education students at the University of Pretoria, and the education campus of the University of Mpumalanga, Kenyatta University, University of Cape Town as well as at Kabwangasi Primary Teachers’ College in East Uganda. This is in line with our new goal of inducting teacher education into the use of the website, while at the same time increasing the numbers of translations and languages at no extra cost. The first two workshop processes yielded 100 Afrikaans translations, 30 isiNdebele translations, and 26 siSwati translations. The work with Kenyatta University continues to be productive. The 2 workshops with the students produced 8 new stories, and translations of 6 stories into 4 languages – all uploaded onto the website.

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Story development and translation workshops are also a strategy for opening up new countries. We held one such workshop in Ethiopia towards the end of 2015. Thus far we have stories in the following languages spoken in Ethiopia: Amharic (15 stories), Afan Oromo (9 stories), Anywak (2 stories) and Somali (1 story).

We have started working with libraries as well. A workshop with children at the Kibera Public Library in Nairobi produced 28 potential stories, with one illustrated and published on the site.

Advocacy and partner development Internationally, we are participating actively in meetings and research for the USAID/Norad initiative, the Global Book Fund. Research on local language supplementary materials in 11 African countries commissioned by the Global Book Fund revealed that “Digital content [in these countries is] largely produced by African Storybook Project,” and that the project has had a major impact on the availability of openly licensed early reading material. A case study on the African Storybook initiative will appear in the UNESCO/COL publication to be launched in March 2016: “Open Educational Resources: Policy, Costs and Transformation,” edited by Fengchun Miao, Sanjaya Mishra and Rory McGreal.

In terms of advocacy events, key events in 2015 were two papers, a panel and a workshop at the Pan African Reading Association for All conference in Cape Town, as well as invited participation in a panel organised by USAID and one organised by World Vision at the Comparative International Education Society Conference in Washington. As a result of a successful workshop held at the distance teacher education conference in Mauritius in July, we were invited to present as part of a panel at the International Literacy Day in Paris in September. Members of our research network presented ASb related papers at the premier education conference in South Africa in October (SAERA 2016), as well as at the Language and Development conference in New Delhi. Through Judith Baker, we are nurturing a relationship with the African Language Teachers’ Association in the US, and she and another member of our Steering committee made a presentation at their conference in April to attempt to elicit contributions, mainly of translations into West African languages.

We strengthened our relationship with a challenging district-based school improvement programme in KwaZulu-Natal, the Jika’iMfundo initiative, by running workshops as part of their Teacher Peer Learning Festivals in June and October. At both events, our workshop was the most popular among the Foundation Phase teachers. Partly as a result of this, we were well-positioned to enter into a partnership with Jika’iMfundo, the KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education Library services (KZN DoE ELITS), and Room to Read. The aim of the partnership is to facilitate reading for pleasure in isiZulu in Foundation Phase classrooms in 2 districts in KZN -- through access to stories in isiZulu for children and teachers, and through library support and training of librarians; and to do this in ways that are cost effective, scalable, and replicable.

A further encouraging development in 2015 has been the role that our pilot sites have played in advocacy in the areas in which they are situated. For example, discussions about the use of the African Storybook website and stories featured prominently at the Bathokwa Family Literacy day for

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over 200 parents in Atteridgeville. At Paleng, the site coordinator advocates regularly among the community, teachers/principals, departmental officials, mission people and other NGOs. Advocacy carried out by Kenyan sites included creating awareness of the African Storybook among County Education Officials, Kenya Primary School Heads Association (KPSHA) members, other primary schools and parents. It was also done through organised days such as during inter-school exam setting/marking or County Education Days, Special School Days, Games Days or during ICT in Education Training Sessions (Lolupe and Munanga).

As a result of our external review, we re-organised our Partner Grid according to the following categories: Partners for Influence/Advice, Partners for Systemic Implementation (for example, into the education or library system), Teacher education partners, Story donation partners, Partners who have re-published our stories, and Partners for small scale use of website and/or stories.

The following is the list of contacts or partner organisations per country: South Africa (50), Uganda (23), Kenya (15), United States (14), Canada (6), Ghana (4), Ethiopia (3), Mozambique (2), Rwanda (2), Senegal (2), India (1), Niger (1), Nigeria (1), Tanzania (1), Cameroon (1), Zambia (1), Mali (headquarters of ACALAN). It is clear from this list that we have concentrated on nurturing relationships with partners in the pilot countries as well as the United States and Canada (as a result of our literacy advisor being resident in Boston and our research advisor being resident in Vancouver). We have MoUs or draft MoUs with 20 partners, and we have close enough relationships with 45 organisations in order to list them as partners on our website. We also have a start-up contact base in Ethiopia, Ghana and Rwanda.

In terms of publicity, our mailing list has 809 members, who receive monthly newsflashes with links to stories, as well as periodic newsletters. In addition, we are attempting to reach people through social media. A featured story is posted weekly on our Facebook page and shared with our Twitter followers. Facebook generates 3 to 4 likes per week (total 553 likes to date mainly from South Africa and the United States) and we have 313 followers on Twitter. Through Bonny Norton, we have been connected to the digital newspaper, The Conversation, and two articles about the African Storybook were published in this widely respected publication in the course of 2015 (https://theconversation.com/digital-stories-could-hold-the-key-to-multilingual-literacy-for-african-children-40405 and https://theconversation.com/african-stories-to-get-and-keep-kids-reading-during-school-holidays-51589 . In addition, we have identified 15 websites that make mention of the project - completely without our intervention.

Progress in terms of outcomesOutcome 1: Literacy development organisations and educators working in African countries use the website successfully to find, create, interact with and translate/adapt stories for use in their contexts

As was explained above, there has been a steady growth in the numbers of stories. Though some of this activity can be attributed to the work done by the ASb publishing staff, independent users have

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also been active in the period – users in our pilot sites, but also users who have spontaneously contributed to our website.

A key question is therefore what proportion of the growth of stories on the website is a result of the work of the ASb publishing office, and what proportion is from the work of independent users. Looking to sustainability, there has to be an increase in independent story creation and translation.

105 out of 259 new, and unique storybooks created in 2015 were processed by the ASb publishing office. 154 or 59% of the new stories were user created. 672 of the 879 new translations in 2015 were uploaded and/or checked centrally. This means that 207 or 24% of translations are uploaded by users without engagement from the publishing office. In other words, what we are seeing is that most of the increase in the numbers of stories created on the website this year can be attributed to independent users (including the pilot sites), and that the translation process has to be driven and managed more tightly.

There are some very encouraging examples of independent use of the website for creation, translation and adaptation. Foremost among these is the work of Ingrid Schechter (from University of British Columbia’s English Language Institute) and Isabelle Duston (of Education and Training for Development – ET4D). Because of the dearth of appropriate stories in local languages in Niger, Isabelle herself translated a number of stories first into French, and then oversaw the process of translation of those stories into Hausa, Fulfulde, Zarma and Kanuri. They are now being used as part of Plan International’s Niger Education and Community Strengthening (NECS) project, funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC).

These kinds of “friends” or independent users, who are actively involved in literacy development with the target group, have been most helpful in providing us with detailed feedback on website use. Their feedback has been invaluable in helping us to understand the user experience – especially difficulties with the workflow related to story creation and translation – and in assisting us to identify and make changes where feasible.

Engagement in our pilot sites

The main problems that pilot site users have experienced are: erratic and low bandwidth in certain sites, making it difficult to upload translations, adaptations and created stories; and, the cumbersomeness of the translation and creation process on our website. In addition, some sites reported that they struggled with the technology because of their own lack of capacity. Overall, the sites managed online creation, translation and adaptation, but with a great deal of difficulty in some instances. A particular challenge was uploading of own images. These difficulties were not solved during the course of 2015, but we are intending to massively simplify the creation, illustration uploading and translation process with the new responsive site in 2016.

It has, however, been an effort to get pilot sites to work online. For example, in the 3 Kenya pilot sites, 7 stories were created online, but another 9 offline. In South Africa/Lesotho, 11 stories were created online but another 27 offline. In Uganda, the country coordinator reported at one site, there

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was little or no creation online. At a second site, a majority of stories were uploaded eventually, and in the biggest site, the majority of the stories were created online.

Certain of the sites (Paleng and FLP) preferred to upload their own illustrations, because of the difficulty of finding appropriate illustrations on the website for their stories, but they also struggled with the technology for uploading pictures. Others (e.g. the Atteridgeville schools) used the image bank only.

The difficulties faced with translation and adaptation were not mainly with the technology, but with the linguistic demands of translation and adaptation. Challenges mentioned often were: time-consuming, local terms difficult to translate; change of language means that the level changes. The following comments from pilot site reports bring this list to life:

• It was my first time translating off line, and as I asked FLP team to translate on print, when I checked the language use it was time consuming as they use the local terms not the standard isiZulu. In the use of words “aunt” in isiZulu we didn’t agree on isiZulu word.

• Checking to make sure we are as correct as possible, we had to check many times, we did it at least 4 times for every story. Sometimes we have to change the sentence completely to make sure that it makes sense in Sesotho or in English. Often when translating from English to Sesotho, we have to make the English simpler for children so that it makes sense in Sesotho.

Adaptation was also challenging for pilot site educators. The following interesting points were raised: that in adapting, often some of the main plot, or the sub plots of the story are lost; it is difficult to find illustrations to match the changed text. One of the sites reported that no stories were adapted because it is easier to find a different level story or a story that fitted the context better – adaptation is too time intensive to be productive. However, an interesting practice in the Atteridgeville schools is adaptation done in sessions together with the children – part of the process of use. Perhaps this is a methodology that should be captured and shared.

Outcome 2: Literacy development organisations and educators working in African countries use the stories in a variety of ways (pedagogic and technical) for early literacy in their contexts.

The understanding of how our stories have been used described below has been gathered from pilot site reports in 2015. For more about story use in the pilot sites, please see the External Mid-Term Review.

Reasons for selection of the story for use were generally that the story would be interesting to children, the teacher enjoyed the story, and the story was at the right level and had simple words. Also important, particularly in Uganda, was that the story was related to the curriculum. One of the sites, however, had a different set of reasons for selection: stories that foster self-expression and creativity, stories that give us a chance for discussion with the children.

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Most popular story types. The country coordinators report that the most popular stories are about animals both domestic and wild, about human characters that bring out virtues and vice, folktales, stories about heroes in the community and stories about school.

Language of use. In the Ugandan sites, the choice seemed to be of English mainly (Arua Hill), or local language mainly (Kabbubu, LLA), but there are no concrete examples of use of 2 languages together. However, sites in the other 2 countries exploited the fact that stories are available in English and one or more local languages – largely because children have to learn English as well as a local language, and the stories are available in both. In Atteridgeville (urban context) some interesting patterns emerged. At one school, (Bathokwa) Sepedi is the language used mostly to read the stories but they create in English and translate the stories into Sepedi. At another school, (Patogeng) educators created stories in English as their language of learning is English, and translated from English to Sepedi. The third school (Makgatho) used isiZulu, Sepedi and English for accessing stories, creating, translating and adapting. In the pilot site report reflections, a prominent response was that the stories were used to teach English. There is thus evidence of the website nurturing trans-languaging approaches.

Here is a concrete example of good practice:

- A teacher at Lolupe in Kenya projected “Curious baby elephant” in English. He had read the story before in Ng’aturkana with the class. As soon as the story was projected, pupils recognised it. They read the title in English, teacher asked them what the title was in Ng’aturkana, and they remembered it. They struggled to pronounce some of the words in English but when he showed them the text in Ng’aturkana, they read it fluently without stammering. They pointed out pictures in the English and Ng’aturkana versions. The atmosphere was relaxed and pupils and teacher interacted with ease, asking and answering questions. Since the class was small, teacher could use the print book alongside projection, enabling pupils read the story in two languages at the same time.

This is also a good example of use of print versions of the storybooks alongside digital projection.

Method of delivery for use. A number of sites used two methods of delivery in a complementary way as above. The digital method of delivery has its drawbacks – mainly because it requires a darkened room. In some cases, sites used their subsidy to buy curtains, but in one case, a site used a cupboard for projection – the sides of the cupboard acted as curtains and the cupboard was portable.

The advantage of photocopied storybooks is that children can take them home (and sites reported that the children wanted to do this). However, some sites were not able to afford to photocopy storybooks – the local copyshop was too expensive. Another challenge is that photocopies can easily become dirty or torn. In a couple of sites, this led the site coordinators to use some of the subsidy money to purchase a laminator to strengthen self-printed copies of the storybooks. There was only one successful example of a site in which children borrowed copies of storybooks to take home and read. We intend to make a video of the borrowing process, so that other users can see how it can be done.

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Use of stories. When using the storybooks, educators taught children to recognize and learn sounds and letters, how to read/pronounce words, and discussed the meanings of new words. Several sites did good work getting children to dramatise the stories. In one site, the children’s own workshopped story was enacted and videoed. Educators used the stories for children to read on their own (individually); to read to other children; and, in some cases, to stimulate children to write their own stories. In the libraries, the main aim was reported as helping the children to become interested in reading books and listening to stories. Some examples of particularly good use of storybooks are: children illustrating stories on newsprint as a means of engaging with the story; children talking / writing new endings to existing stories.

Translation/adaptation for use. A key emphasis for 2015 was to encourage pilot sites to create, translate and adapt in order to use the storybooks, rather than simply to fulfil the deliverables. Although there are some exceptions (for example, at Paleng and FLP where translation/adaptation are done only for use), the general tendency in 2 of the pilot countries is to translate to increase the number of stories in the local language, while selecting those already in that language for use.

Spontaneous uptake

What has been gratifying this year is the amount of spontaneous uptake by partners not in pilot sites to use the stories in a variety of ways (pedagogic and technical) for early literacy in their contexts.

Notable among these is Ingrid Schechter (already mentioned above) for her work with Mozambican teachers this year to illustrate, translate and upload stories in Portuguese and local African languages and with teachers in Gugulethu on isiXhosa stories. She wrote a very interesting blog (Using ASb stories in the non-digital classroom) on how she used the stories to support teaching reading through stories. She reports: “…to date the response of the teachers has been enthusiastic: the gr 2 teachers are clamouring to be included, and the teachers are passing on the various new methods to each other. I would also like to highlight our small budget: perhaps R100 per class for copying, plus the time of one facilitator once a week. My hope is that the ASP might become an instrument for enlivening the practices of existing primary schools teachers: heaven knows they get little enough encouragement in their work!”

Secondly, Diane Ross (Otterbein University, US, a contact made through Bonny Norton) who spent a sabbatical working in Uganda, writes:

“I just need to tell you how amazing using the ASP website has been. I have shared it at two schools, one orphanage, and with two universities; Ugandan Christian University (UCU) and Makerere University. I bring this website up at any meeting I have with anyone. People are so impressed. The students have been mesmerized. I read English stories with groups of 50-80 students and there can be a range of ages from 3-15 and they all read together as I project the story. However, the most fun has been when they choose a Lugandan story and then teach me their language. They love that.”

We hope to track this spontaneous uptake more systematically in 2016.

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Outcome 3: There is a growing recognition that openly licensed stories available for versioning for particular contexts and languages have a significant role to play in supporting early literacy development, particularly of very young African children.

This outcome focusses on changing mindsets away from a restrictive copyright approach which prevents adaptation of resources for own use and cost-effective re-production of resources, towards a mindset that recognises the value of openly licensed resources in addressing the critical shortage of local language stories at early literacy level, as well as ease of their distribution.

There is a great deal of evidence of achievement of this outcome.

1. Extent of alignment with the international literacy development community

In the 2015 review of local language supplementary readers for early reading conducted by RTI International for the Global Book Fund findings of materials review, the contribution of the African Storybook initiative to global thinking about book development and provision was acknowledged. Three of the 5 key findings of the RTI survey endorse the approach the African Storybook initiative is taking:

Foster the development of materials in African languages

Foster the sharing and use of titles within and across language groups

Encourage the use of Creative Commons licensing.

2. Government support for systemic implementation

In each of the countries, there is evidence of government buy-in. A description of the main examples follows.

In Uganda, we are pursuing a cost share relationship for the production of ASb titles as supplementary readers for schools that are part of the USAID funded School Health and Reading programme (engaged in resource provision and teacher training for mother tongue reading instruction in 12 Ugandan languages). As a result of our relationship with this programme, but also through the advocacy work of the Country Coordinator, we were invited to make a presentation to the Basic Education Working Group in April 2015. They were extremely impressed by the fact that we have stories in local languages (such as Lumasaaba (68) and Ateso (30) and Lunyole (126)) in which there are currently no available storybooks for early reading.

In Kenya, we have a draft MoU with the e-learning division of the Kenyan Institute for Curriculum Development (KICD). We have had several workshops with their staff. These have resulted in 14 stories being KICD approved. In addition, the KICD staff have illustrated 2 new stories – on a volunteer basis. The goal is 100 KICD approved stories advertised on the KICD website. KICD will also make available such stories on a CD ROM for schools to use. The KICD stamp of approval will facilitate system-wide use of the stories. Already, a tablet initiative, iMlango, which delivers internet access and an internet learning portal to 195 primary schools in Kenya (reaching 150 000 children in

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primary schools in 5 counties) has uploaded 43 of our stories onto their portal. The feedback received thus far is very positive. Systemic implementation on a smaller scale is the work done by the National Book Development Council in Kenya, which has used 22 ASb stories to build teachers’ skills in teaching reading in Kajiado County and to help them see that they can create their own stories for use.

In South Africa, we are working with KwaZulu-Natal Department of Education Library Services (KZN DoE ELITS) and Jika’iMfundo, a school improvement programme operating in all schools in 2 districts in the province. Also working with us is Room to Read, an NGO that provides local language print books for reading, and trains school librarians in library development. Jika’iMfundo wants to promote reading for pleasure, but has not yet found a way to do this cost-effectively. KZN DoE ELITS is responsible for library development and resourcing in the province – but on a very small budget. They struggle in particular to source appropriate storybooks in isiZulu. We were invited to make a presentation on the affordances of our open licence digital publishing model, and it became clear that the Department could use its current budget to obtain 5 times as many books as would have been possible when using traditional publishing models.

The print solution we were able to offer them was a full colour Grade 1, Grade 2 and Grade 3 Story Starter Pack, together with 10 black and white copies of each of the titles for the teacher’s class. Working with one of their preferred providers, a quote was obtained: for 5000 teachers’ anthologies, at a price of R15.04 per book (less than 70 pence) and for 166 000 pupils’ books, a price of R2 per book (less than 10 pence). The order was placed and the books were delivered early in 2016, for distribution through Jika’iMfundo at their training sessions for teachers. In addition, we provided training materials for use of the Story Starter Pack, and undertook the training of the departmental subject advisors late last year. Finally, with funding obtained through Jika’iMfundo, we prepared a flashdrive of 100 stories (50 in isiZulu, and 50 in English), together with 4 videos demonstrating how to use the stories. Each flashdrive pre-loaded and branded appropriately cost R50 (just over GBP2). The goal for our part of the project is to encourage teachers to realise that although it is good to have some titles in paper-based format for classroom use, it is possible to have so many more in digital format (on a flashdrive). And then, if the libraries developed through Room to Read in the province have internet connectivity, teachers can access even more of our free stories to read with their pupils.

Already this initiative has attracted attention from other providers in the province. For example, Vodacom has uploaded our stories and advertised us on their Digital Classrooms website http://digitalclassroom.co.za/digitalclassroom/other-resources-3/african-storybook-stories – yet another way in which teachers can access our material.

We hope that we can use this experience to motivate the Northern Cape province in South Africa as well as Departments of Education and national programmes in other countries to use our training and publishing services in a similar way. We have already had several meetings in the Northern Cape, and have also put in a proposal to the British Council for possible collaboration on a USAID funded literacy development project in Ghana.

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3. Willingness to donate illustrated stories under an open licence

Our experience of this is recorded in a short case study1 detailing the authors and publishers we have approached, and what our experience has been. Prominent cultural producers have been willing to donate their work – Gcina Mhlope, William Gumede, Lindi Matshikiza – all famous South African writers. Writers “with a mission” are very open to donation – such as Elizabeth Laird, a UK writer who worked with the British Council to collect and publish hundreds of Ethiopian stories; and Kirsten Boie, a renowned German children’s author who is using some of our siSwati stories in an anthology for work she is producing in Swaziland. Generally, authors are happy to allow us to re-publish their work under an open licence, but often do not realise that their illustrators need to be asked separately.

Conventional publishers are mixed in their reactions – some (like Cambridge University Press or Jacana) are not open to sharing, but others, like Oxford University Press SA and Fountain Publishers Uganda have expressed admiration of our efforts.

Notable in this period is the fact that the Molteno Institute for Language and Literacy, initially not willing to share their materials with us, has now released their full set of graded readers under a Creative Commons licence at http://vulabula.molteno.co.za/vulabula. Funded by Zenex, they are exploring an alternative business model to earn revenue from their services, rather than from their content.

4. Take up by teacher educators

As the external reviewers pointed out, key to the long term sustainability of the initiative is to impact on trainee teachers. In most countries, there is an awareness that new teachers need IT skills, and an initiative like ASb that provides a curriculum-linked way to use these skills is particularly helpful. In addition, in most African countries, the policy is that reading must be taught in the local language, although usually there is little or no reading material to support this.

The focus of our work in teacher education institutions (Siyabuswa Education Campus at the University of Mpumalanga, University of Pretoria, Kenyatta University, University of Cape Town) is to attempt to integrate the use of the ASb stories and website into teacher education programmes – requiring story creation, translation, use and evaluation. The students benefit by being exposed to a range of contextually relevant stories in English and local languages, and the website is expanded in the process, with work that is checked by lecturers of the African languages. The assignments are

1 Lorato Trok, Jenny Louw, Tessa Welch. 2015. “Open Licensing and the African Storybook Project”

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authentic tasks, and students are highly excited to see their stories or translations actually published.

5. Take up by other innovators

An excellent testimony to the power of openly licensed resources is the use that Liam Doherty has made of the stories on the ASb site. Liam (a postgraduate student from the University of British Columbia) has created what he calls Global ASP, a project that has grown organically out of “the inspiration and materials provided by the African Storybook Project: Global-ASP is an effort to translate the amazing work being done here into as many of the languages of the world as possible.” Liam has selected a list of 346 English versions of illustrated stories from the ASb website, and encouraged friends to translate these stories into more languages. To date, 53 ASb stories have been translated, some of each in: Cantonese, Mandarin, Danish, Esperanto, German, Hindi, Jamaican Creole, Japanese, Nepali, Norwegian, Persian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Tagalog. As he says:

“The goal of Global ASP is to translate the freely-licensed materials created by the African Storybook Project into all of the world's languages so that children and language learners everywhere can enjoy these wonderful African stories and create new ones in the same spirit.”

In the process, Liam has experimented with alternative ways to translate stories online, and has invented a wonderful Image Explorer which dispenses with metadata, and uses the text accompanying illustrations in stories to search for illustrations in any language.

Aside from Liam Doherty, there are numerous other examples of people using our stories, particularly for a range of educational apps. Notable has been Erik Lonnroth (employed by Pearson at the time), who used our Kiswahili and English stories in an app he created for parents of children in Tanzanian public schools. The experiment involved encouraging parents to let their children use the app on the parents’ phones. Using a Randomised Control Test, Erik was able to prove that after one month, the children’s reading speed had improved by 10 words per minute. Our content and his concept clearly work well together!

Outcome 4a: Saide has a better understanding of changes required by engagement with this project.

We realise that it is important to ensure that collective ownership of the website and its tools is achieved by project team members. In 2015 with the changes in the technical stream as well as the decision to redevelop the site, it was necessary to negotiate a new technical stream change management process. The governance structure for this process is a Change Advisory Board, consisting of representatives from the Steering Committee, staff involved with our partners on the ground, as well as the Technical and Publishing streams. The purpose of this Board is to look at the cost implications of a proposed change as well as highlighting risks. It is also a formal way of ensuring that the Technical Stream does not run ahead with development without consultation with key project staff.

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Part of this technical change management process is an error reporting system via tickets that are allocated to various stream members to resolve within a stipulated time period. This system ensures accountability of the Technical Stream not only to project staff, but also to other users of the site. In the new responsive site, requests for help will automatically be forwarded to the ticketing system. The tickets are summarized for each meeting of the Technical Stream to further monitor progress.

In the project team as a whole, we have several ways of reflecting on progress and capturing lessons of experience. Firstly, the quarterly highlight meetings with the team, which facilitate sharing across work streams in a more in-depth way than project management meetings. Secondly, in the course of last year, we held two sets of reflection workshops, one in July and one in December, not only to reflect on progress, but also to prepare ourselves for the changes in the project in 2016 and beyond.

Outcome 4b: Saide’s ability to manage a growing number of collaborative relationships improves.

We were careful in 2015 to systematically record and analyse how we managed our partnerships. We discussed the resulting partner analysis report at our end-of-year reflection meeting. The following key lessons of experience emerged:

1.Wherever possible, use existing networking organisations for advocacy (see success in Uganda, and Judith Baker’s international Reading Association network).

2.Often it is difficult to get explicit endorsement from the senior person – it is wise to attempt to work at other levels while waiting for the right moment to engage with the senior person or relevant top official.

3.In a country where there aren’t published illustrated local language materials ready for donation, a partner-led story development process with a trusted, experienced facilitator is a good way to push the story donation process forward.

4.Partnerships work best when there is a champion within an organisation or network. We need to think about ways of recognising/rewarding such champions.

5.A certain amount of translation can be done by individuals on a volunteer basis but in order to get a critical mass of stories in particular languages, translation work has to be funded either by ourselves or a partner.

Outcome 4c: Saide’s project management processes become more rigorous.

As previously reported, the Prince2 project management system has also been adopted by three other large projects within Saide. For the first time in 2015, we held a joint reflection workshop across the staff of the three Saide projects to interrogate people’s experiences of the key features of the system. As a result, we are modifying the approach a little, not only within the African Storybook, but in the other three Saide projects as well. One of the key insights to emerge was that in a large multi-stream project, stream meetings are more important than meetings with the project team as a whole. So we have reduced the frequency of project team meetings, and increased the frequency of

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stream meetings. On the other hand, it is also of vital importance to retain a focus on the high level objectives/outcomes for the project. While products of the project are important, it is also imperative see that the products combine appropriately toward the project ends.

Another growing realisation for the project team has been why it is important for individual team members to track their time, and link that time to deliverables or stream products. We are making it easier to do this in 2016 by clarifying accountability for particular products.

ConclusionWe believe that we are making a difference in terms of the broader development agenda in the countries in which we are operating.

In terms of the Sustainable Developments agreed internationally in 2015, we are aligned with Goal 4: Ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. The project addresses the fundamentals of lifelong learning, namely the ability to read. By targeting the indigenous languages of Africa, as well as the most used languages of wider communication in Africa, we are making a contribution to equitable quality education. It is the marginalised 80% in African societies who need reading materials in their own languages, as well as local materials in colonial languages that afford access to better work and educational opportunities. Because our stories are available also in English (and increasingly in French and Portuguese as well), trans-languaging between dominant and less powerful languages is facilitated, i.e. the use of different languages to support comprehension.

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