Improving School Literacy: Nascent Solutions Begins Training Over 40 Book Writers

The 2018 McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Programme, sponsored by the United States government under the US Department for Agriculture, USDA, is implemented by Nascent Solutions in 240 primary schools in the Adamawa, East, North and North West Regions of Cameroon. Within the context of this project, Nascent is setting up and equipping libraries in all intervention schools.

There is quite some literature on the market for elementary school children, but very little of it is relevant to Cameroon’s context, says Mary Wong, Education Programme Manager for the international charity, Nascent Solutions Incorporated. “We have story books on the market that are imported from the West with Western themes. They are good for broadening the worldview of children, but in order to generate interest in reading, the reader must be able to identify with the content and context,” she counsels. 

It is for this reason that the international charity, Nascent Solutions, is organising four days of training in Yaounde (October 12-15, 2020) for would-be and already practising writers on how to write books for primary school pupils or young learners. The workshop for 24 French-speaking writers is facilitated by Louis Pascal Ngono, Francis Barah and Chris Darby, from the Summer Institute of Linguistics, SIL International. A similar workshop is due to hold in Bamenda for 26 English-speaking children’s book writers in early November 2020, making a total of 48.    

According to Wong, most of the books for young learners in the country are recommended textbooks. She warns that such a situation contributes to slow growth in children developing a reading culture. Moreover, children’s story books are generally not available, she says. “The few available ones are most often unaffordable and inaccessible to many children, especially in rural communities,” Wong says.

Throu...