In a recent webinar, GBA Steering Committee member from Association for the Development of Education in Africa (ADEA), Albert Nsengiyumva, stressed that in Africa reading must be encouraged by families, specifically children at home.
The Global Digital Library, funded by Norway, partnered with ADEA and the Rwanda Education Board (REB) to help translate digital storybooks currently on the GDL from English into Kinyarwanda. The translation, carried out by Ministry of Education staff, was approved for use in classrooms by that same ministry. In the future, the books are expected to be aligned with the current school curriculum.
Officials from Rwanda’s Ministry of Education described the process: 50 books were identified from the GDL’s English language collection as contextually appropriate to Rwanda, though, “as much as we paid attention to the Rwandan context, we did not want to lose the message of the original stories,” said Dr. Gatera Augustin, from the Rwanda Education Board. Those 50 stories were then translated by government officials into Kinyarwanda, and uploaded to a government e-learning platform for Rwandan school children.
The translated books are also available on the Global Digital Library.
Officials described the value of learning the “art of translation” and now plan to translate many more books into Kinyarwanda, now that there is a community of those who know how to do it.
Mr. Dag-Inge Ulshtein, Norwegian Minister of International Development, affirmed the importance of reading materials for children in languages that they use and understand, and commended the Global Book Alliance, ADEA and all other partners involved in the pilot initiative.
The Rwandan Minister of Education, Dr. Valentine Uwamariya, urged other countries to follow Rwanda’s lead. A senior official from Kenya joined the webinar and stated that Rwanda has “shown that it can be done, and we are ready to follow.” Kenya is now in the early stages of identifying culturally relevant books from the Global Digital Library and hopes to follow a similar process for creating books in Kiswahili that are officially approved for use in classrooms by the Ministry of Education.
Both Norway and ADEA are members of the Global Book Alliance, which is a partnership of donor agencies, multilateral institutions, and civil society organizations committed to bringing books to every child in the world by 2030 through coordinated effort to shape the book market.
For more information about how to become involved in storybook translation efforts in your country, reach out to admin@globalbookalliance.org