Promoting reading and literacy with all ages of the community

LITERACY AND LIBRARY IN MALAWI, AFRICA

Ripple Africa built Mwaya Community Library in 2005 and since then both Adult Literacy and Adult Education sessions take place there. With thousands of books, this library is one of very few in Malawi.

ADULT LEARNERS AT THE READING SHELTER

MWAYA COMMUNITY LIBRARY

WE PAY THE SALARIES OF THE LIBRARY TEAM

Adult Literacy in Malawi, Africa

Achievements and Future Plans

Mwaya Community Library was built in 2005 and it is equipped with 4,500 books. There are over 1,600 library members and many adults in the community have been helped to learn English and to read and write. Students at Open School at Kapanda are being helped with their coursework through adult education classes. We will continue to support the library, the classes and purchasing additional books.

How We Work

We pay the running costs of the library to provide the facility for the local community. We support four Adult Education classes each week where Open School students are supported with subject lessons, and one Adult Literacy class where students are taught to read and write, and are encouraged to read newspapers and books. Students are also taught to write letters and to fill in forms. We run an English Reading Club for children too.

£8 COULD BUY A SCHOOL TEXTBOOK USED FOR SELF-STUDY AT THE LIBRARY

fURTHER INFORMATION

Accordion #1

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.

Why it is so important

Mwaya Community Library

Ripple Africa has constructed and maintains the Mwaya Community Library – a community library which was opened in 2005 and contains a wide variety of books for adults and children which has proved to be a very popular facility. In Malawi, very few people have access to any books at all, yet the link between books and literacy is self-explanatory. In addition to the obvious educational benefits, access to books is critical to developing a greater understanding of the world.

Books provide entertainment, knowledge, reference, advice, and exposure to outside cultures, practices, and views. A library not only helps to encourage the habit of reading, but inspires a thirst for knowledge which generates understanding and openness to new ideas.

We love seeing the wonder in the faces of people when they first visit the library, and the response of young children captivated by the musical books and colourful collections of children’s fiction. However, it is seeing library members reading Shakespeare, and community members viewing picture books of what animals look like in different countries for the very first time, that really touches our hearts. The Community Library is important not only because it supports education – one of Ripple Africa’s three pillars of activity – but for the varied and complex ways it is enjoyed by so many people in the community. As most of the residents in our area live on under a $1 a day, this free resource is vital.

Adult Education and Adult Literacy

Ripple Africa supports Adult Education and Adult Literacy in Malawi through the running of four adult education classes and one adult literacy class a week. Two Adult Education sessions take place at Mazembe Primary School and the remainder of the adult learning sessions take place at the library. The sessions are open to those living in Mwaya, Mazembe, Katenthere and other surrounding villages.

Ripple Africa:

pays the salaries of a teacher and an assistant teacher at each adult education or literacy class
facilitates a weekly lesson planning session
provides ongoing support for Mwaya Community Library including the purchase of new books.

All the students who attend the classes are members of the library and are able to borrow books to use each week to support their learning.

Illiteracy is a problem throughout Africa, and Malawi is no exception where a lack of access to quality education, high student to teacher ratios, high primary school drop-out rates, and low secondary school enrolment all contribute to generally low literacy rates which mean many people struggle with basic day to day tasks.

According to UNESCO Institute for Statistics (March 2016), 65.75% of the adult population (aged 15 years and above) in Malawi can read and write. For adult men, the literacy rate is 73% and for women it is 59%.

Literacy is generally worse amongst older adults than amongst younger people. The youth literacy rate (literacy amongst people age 15-24) in Malawi is 75%. While primary education has been free in Malawi since 1994, many adults who were school age before this period may never have attended primary school at all, and those who did attend may only have attended intermittently as and when their families could afford to pay the necessary school fees.

Literacy is critically important because being able to read and write makes a huge difference to doing many simple day to day activities. This is reflected in some of the reasons community members have given for joining the classes, including wanting:

to be able to read the newspaper instead of just looking at the pictures
to help their children with homework
to understand forms
to write letters
to join the library
to read a simple story to their children.

Children’s Reading Club
We started welcoming children, predominantly from the Mwaya area, on a Saturday morning to read and look at books at the library. However, we are pleased that we have been able to expand this project and we now provide English reading clubs in four different villages.

The Reading Club is led by Ellen and Ben, two of our pre-school teachers. The idea is to provide an additional learning space to bridge the English-learning gap between Standards 1 and 4 as well as a place to start exploring books. The sessions are not exclusively for those year groups as we have several Standard 5 students also coming for help.

Each teacher runs two sessions per week in two different villages. The afterschool session is split into four activities including phonics, story-telling, speaking and a game.

What we have achieved

The library holds over 4,500 books, magazines, and newspapers, which are all catalogued.
The library is a resource to the wider community, who can become library members for free.
There are currently over 1,600 library members who can choose to borrow books to read at home.
There is a custom-built reading room, which opened in 2009 where the Mwaya adult education and adult literacy classes meet.
Ripple Africa pays the salary of two librarians, one adult education and literacy teacher and two reading club teachers.
To date, only a handful of books have gone missing and, unlike many libraries, the team have a bicycle to chase up overdue books! If any books do go missing, the borrower is responsible for paying for a replacement.
Adult students who were previously illiterate are now able to read and write.
Non English speaking members have learnt the basics of the English language.
Some students have been offered places at Open School at Kapanda to finish their secondary education.
Children that are attending Reading Clubs are really enjoying being able to access books and read.

How we work

Ripple Africa pays the running costs of the library to provide the facility for the local community which includes the salaries of two librarians, together with other ancillary items such as subscriptions to the national newspapers.

Ripple Africa pays for the teachers to run the adult education and adult literacy classes held each week and to run the reading club sessions.

The project's future

Ripple Africa’s community library is very well stocked with books. However, it would still benefit from locally purchased books written in the languages of ChiChewa and ChiTonga. Many of the books are well used and replacement copies are regularly needed. We are also making sure that there are copies of school text books available for students to use as reference books as the schools do not have enough copies. These need to be replaced each time the school curriculum changes. The library has quickly become an important free community resource and requires continuing funding.

Ripple Africa will continue to offer Adult Education and Adult Literacy, and Children’s Reading Clubs to the community.