Enabling Writers Produce 2,000 Books in Nine Months!

Enabling Writers authors in the Philippines.

SIL LEAD has assisted the Enabling Writers Workshop Program through the provision of Bloom training workshops, Bloom Trainer certification and support, and through the localization of Bloom software and training videos.  It is wonderful to see the amazing progress being made by this program! Please read the following article from our friends at the Global Reading Network, reproduced here with their permission.

Succeeding months ahead of schedule, local authors in five countries working with the Enabling Writers Workshop Program (EW) have created nearly 2,000 different books for children in grades 1, 2 and 3. Written in the language the youngsters hear at home and illustrated with culturally sensitive imagery, the titles are being field tested for use in schools and under review for adoption by the Ministries of Education in the Philippines, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Indonesia, and Haiti. Negotiations for a sixth project in Kiswahili/Kenya have been put on pause over budgetary limitations.

Funded by All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR GCD)-a partnership of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), World Vision and the Australian Government - the Enabling Writers Workshop Program supports the Global Book Alliance's goal to transform book development, procurement and distribution to ensure that no child is without books. The objectives of the program are to develop substantial sets of high-quality decodable and leveled books for adoption by ministries of education and use by schools in developing countries, develop sustainability for local capacity to continue creating quality decodable and leveled books beyond the scope of the funded project, and to produce a large set of quality books, using the Bloom book-writing software, for sharing via the Global Digital Library and other online e-book access points.

Participants in the Enabling Writers workshop in Bangladesh display their creations.