4th ALP Summit 2013 Reading Day

The Development Aid from People to People (Dapp) Chilangoma Teachers Training College on Thursday hosted a Reading Day during the 4th African Library Project (ALP) Summit 2013 at the college’s grounds in Chileka.

Speaking at the event, guest of honour director of National Library Services (NLS) Gray Nyali said the service has taken up the challenge of promoting early child reading programmes in collaboration with the partners who were gathered at the reading.

“It is our hope and belief that the distribution, teacher librarian training and reading programmes will benefit children that read in the libraries which are managed by various stakeholders such as Dapp, Wungwero Book Foundation and Malawi Institute of Management (MIM) with support from the ALP,” said Nyali.

Nyali further said despite efforts from many players in the educational sector, there is still a shortage of reading materials in schools in the country’s rural areas.

“We all know that the learners in schools do not find many books in their homes so the school has a big role to play. This is why we welcome this initiative from ALP of donating 1 000 books per library,” he said.

ALP is a volunteer organisation in the United States of America, which donates 1 000 books to existing small African libraries or others established in 2005 by Chris Bradshaw.

Its aim is to promote the reading culture in African counties by transforming African libraries without books into libraries with a wide reading reserve.

So far, the project has opened 182 small libraries in Malawi. It has also sent over a million books to Africa.

African Library Project founder and president Chris Bradshaw said she was very happy with the strides the project has made because books are now readily available to many students in Africa who did not have access to them.

The summit which was held for the purpose of finding new ways to distribute books across Africa was opened on October 19 and ended on October 25.

Delegates came from Botswana, Lesotho, Swaziland, Ghana, Sierra Leone and the United States of America.