Stories from Djibouti, Lao PDR, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan and Zimbabwe showing how they are ensuring that more children have access to textbooks with support from GPE and other partners.
World Book Day, celebrated on April 23 all around the world, gives us the opportunity to acknowledge how books can change lives, especially reading books and textbooks available to children as their learn at school.
Read a few stories from Djibouti, Kenya, Lao PDR, Nicaragua, Somalia, South Sudan and Zimbabwe showcasing the efforts from GPE and partners to ensure more children have access to textbooks and a quality education.
In the preschool B class at Ali-Sabieh 2 School, the children are singing a nursery rhyme.
"The aim here is to teach them to count to 10," whispers their teacher, Souleika Aden.
In Djibouti, early childhood education is a priority for the government. "This is a very important year in a child's school journey. The country caught on to this very quickly," confirms Naglah Mohamed, National Preschool Education Inspector.
With this in mind, GPE and its partners have supported the ministry’s efforts to develop a new guide (skills framework), approved in 2022, detailing the skills expected of teachers after training, accompanied by modules and pedagogical guides that encourage learning through play, among other things.
Children with access to early education enter primary school ready to learn and often do better over their entire schooling. Unfortunately, the benefits of early education are not enjoyed by all children in Lao PDR and low levels of basic literacy affect children throughout the country.
In 2015, with GPE funding and the World Bank overseeing the GPE grant, the government introduced a reading readiness program in the national language. To date, 142 classrooms have received specialized kits of instructional materials to implement the reading readiness program and 183 teachers have been trained by coaches on applying the new approach.
Results have surpassed expectations: 90% of the teachers trained now implement the approach with high fidelity. The learning environment in the GPE-supported schools promotes a culture of reading: 83.7% of schools provide grade-appropriate story books compared to only 51.9% in 2017, and 76.9% provide a comfortable place to sit and read compared to 41.4% over the same period.
All of these efforts have led to better learning outcomes: between 2018 and 2021 the percentage of young learners with awareness of print increased from 35% to 55% in target classrooms, meaning that more children open books correctly, know the correct directionality of the written language, and can differentiate between text and other graphic elements in print materials.
As the COVID-19 pandemic swept Nicaragua, the Ministry of Education prioritized education continuity and the mitigation of learning losses. Though schools didn’t close, students from lower-income families coped poorly due to irregular attendance and lack of access to digital devices and connectivity.
GPE funding, with support from the World Bank, supported the design and distribution of instructional booklets aimed at students without digital access. Over 10,000 educational centers received 2.5 million copies of the booklets, which covered mathematics, natural sciences, social sciences, and language and literature across grades.
Before COVID-19, an estimated 3 million children in Somalia were out of school. The pandemic combined with protracted crises over the past two decades—conflict as well as natural disasters like drought and flooding—have only exacerbated Somalia’s education challenges.
Through an emergency grant managed by Save the Children, GPE supported the government to ensure the most vulnerable children—including children from internally displaced communities—have access to learning during crises.
The GPE-funded program supported the distribution of nearly 295,000 textbooks and learning materials, benefiting 35,000 students. The program also included the construction of 82 teaching and learning spaces in locations with the largest concentration of internally displaced Somalis.
The conflict in South Sudan has taken a toll on its education system, while climate-related shocks such as flooding and the after-effects of the COVID-19 pandemic continue to hinder access to quality education.
To help address these difficulties, GPE funded the printing and distribution of 462,700 teacher guides and more than 4.9 million textbooks, which benefited more than 2.3 million students. In addition, 18,100 have been trained so far on the use of the new textbooks.
These new learning and teaching materials represent a major step towards implementing the country’s new national curriculum—developed with earlier GPE support in 2017.
“Last year, our enrollment was 1,222 and this year it has reached 1,300. And as we speak, parents are still coming to register their children.”
In 2017, Zimbabwe introduced a new curriculum to promote competence-based learning, resulting in the addition of several new subjects, but also worsening an already crippling shortage of textbooks.
A GPE-funded program, in partnership with UNICEF and the Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education, has distributed about 17 million textbooks on various subjects, including six new learning areas, to students at more than 6,000 primary and secondary schools.
Previously, lessons were a struggle for both learners and teachers. The response from students has been overwhelmingly encouraging, say school authorities, and cases of bullying over textbooks are a thing of the past.
“Teaching without textbooks was challenging. We had to scrounge for the information needed to plan a lesson and then spend a lot of time writing on the board. Nowadays, it is so easy, we just refer to the textbooks.”
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