Millennium Promise - Extreme Poverty Ends Here

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Project Updates

• Nourishing Young Minds with a Library of Books 23 Mar 2010

  

  “Achieve UNIVERSAL primary education,” is Goal #2 of eight Millennium Development Goals. It is preceded only by Goal #1: Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger. In Ruhiira, the two go hand-in-hand. Children who spend their days working in fields and foraging for food cannot attend school. So the Millennium Villages project partners with the UN World Food Programme, parents, and local farmers to ensure school children receive hot meals each day. And, to keep students dry so they can attend even during the rainy season, new school buildings are being constructed. Results are excellent: attendance is high. Each of the area's 21 three or four-room schools are filled with hundreds of students.

  “Ruhiira’s made tremendous strides in education,” says the regional education guru, Ssenkugube Lawrence. “Now what we need to do is stoke the fire for learning.”

  Kindling a Love for Learning
  Lawrence explains how creating a reading library will kindle learning. “The library of readers will provide a source of reading material for the students. They will be able to borrow novels to read during the times when they are free or during the reading hour that will be provided at the end of the day. They will also be able to read a local newspaper and get knowledge on health, agriculture and also improve their written and oral skills. Some of the readers will be in English and others will be in the local language.”

  Students Take Charge
  According to Lawrence, the teachers plan to encourage a committee of students to manage the lending and organizing of books: “Students will constitute a library committee and the headteacher will assign them a patron who is a teacher. They will make a timetable for lending books, create rules for borrowing and a borrowing record. They will daily have a member or two at the place where the library cupboard is to lend and receive back books.

  Teachers Take the Show on the Road
  Like wildfire envelopes a prairie, Lawrence hopes the enthusiasm for the library will spread to other schools: “The headteachers of the two neighboring schools mentioned earlier will also select two teachers who will come once a week to isingisha to collect readers in the commuting library. These teachers will be provided with a bicycle on whose carrier there will be a tin box attached for transporting the books. The teacher will be able to receive another set of books after returning the ones they will have borrowed. Similar to isingisha library committees constituted of student will be made in Rwentsinga and Nyakitunda schools that will benefit from the commuting library.”

  Rewarding Student Achievement
  Lawrence explains further how teachers plan to give students recognition for their academic achievements: “In order to ensure that the student does not just borrow and return but reads and understands, each borrower will be required to bring a half a page summary of the book s/he has read and the teacher in charge of the Library will select those that have read meaningfully before entering them into the competition. Rewards like pens, pencils, geometry sets, books, certificates will be given to outstanding students. The summaries of the books made by the students will be published in a local book and their photos included. A competition will be held twice a year to identify the best readers.”

  Here at GoodAdds, the platform that’s raising funds for this project, we’re hoping Lawrence and the teachers send us some of those winning essays so we can share them with all the project’s supporters!

  For children to learn, they need to be fed, body and soul. A new library program provides books in both the local language and English, novels, and newspapers.