Imagine the Gibberish
/Imagine for a moment a time when you’ll no longer be quarantined in your home. Imagine your local library has once again opened, and you can once again take your kids there to check out books. But imagine that almost all the books in that local library are written in gibberish—that only one out of every one hundred books in your library has been written in a language that your children can actually understand.
Can you imagine how frustrating that would be?
There are still many minority languages out there with no books at all for children to read and enjoy in their own language. But as this video from our partners at All Children Reading states, “Only one percent of books in low resource countries are published in accessible formats, like audio, braille, large print, or with sign language videos.”
Your children mean the world to you, but you also know that all children matter—that they all need the opportunity to experience the joy of books and reading. They deserve to laugh and to learn from stories and educational materials that meet them where they are.
That’s why we’ve been so grateful that All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR GCD) has given us the opportunity to create over four hundred books for underserved children in Mali. ACR GCD’s Begin With Books award has provided us with the resources to bring Malian children with disabilities unprecedented access to books.
Instead of browsing shelves full of books that might as well be written in gibberish, these children will have new opportunities to learn and grow.
Time spent in quarantine has reminded us that books allow children to step outside of their everyday world—to escape momentarily the restraints of everything from disabilities to pandemics. Every book opens a door into another world, and because of this initiative, new doors are opening all over.
There are approximately only 30 children's books in the Soninke and Sénoufo languages although there are about 2 million speakers. Our Begin With Books project seeks to increase that number by over 1,000% by providing 400 children's books in those two languages as well as 20 titles in Malian Sign Language. We'll focus on leveled books (books created at graduated levels of difficulty) and decodable books (books containing only the letters or “sight words” that the student has already learned). We plan to create and adapt books with inclusive themes such as female empowerment, and stories where the protagonist has a disability. We’ll prioritize genres including science, technology, the environment, health, and diversity. As was stated in this video from All Children Reading, “when you're able to read, you're able to learn, and learning opens the door to all kinds of opportunities.”