Uh oh... wizards in Gowrie-Kunkua in Ghana

From librarian Jennifer's monthly report on the library, explaining why visitors at night hours were lower:

The major problem that occurred in community was a curfew from which every member of the community was to stay indoors after five o'clock simply because a member of the community has been accuse of being a wizard and was beaten to death. As a result the law was then taking its course which the police were then arresting and person found outside after 5pm.

Dimikuy Library almost ready to open

Finally I got some pix, courtesy of FAVL volunteers Amy Reggio and Madelyn Bagby... the idea here was a smaller children's library, that would have more emphasis on outdoor reading. So the library building is smaller, and it features girl's and boy's latrines (so they painted them "men" and "women".... ) (and that is Dounko with a big smile). Separate latrines is a BIG DEAL... the first ever in the village. Also FIRST EVER is the tiling of the outdoor reading area. As you can see, they did it in classic "who's in charge" style- rows for the kids, and a special seat for the storyteller in front. Why not a circle, one might ask? What, am I an anthropologist? it is one of those deep mysteries, if you ask me. When I was once asking Donkoui about doing a circular "cours" (the wall around the library), he smiled and said, "Our local masons don't do circles, just straight lines." As you can see from the tiling work, this is a "new art" for local masons... they've literally never had any tile work in a village in the area. So this is a first, and we'll see whether it takes off and whether the artistry improves over the years.

Book inventories

FAVL volunteer Madelyn Bagby and FAVL regional coordinator Sanou Dounko have been doing inventories of the libraries. In general things are going well, but one library, Koumbia, had way too many lost and late books over the past five years. This library had been having some management problems, and is the furthest from our central "zone," so it is not surprising. The librarian has since been replaced with a new librarian. We will be keeping close watch. Note that the number for Karaba, 19 books lost, is the total lost over a five year period (i.e. since inception)... so about 3 books lost per year. Everything is tracked manually, and there are lots of occasions where a child might step out with a book without letting the librarian know. So that is very reasonable. But Koumbia was definitely a problem. They have not done the inventories for Bereba yet, and Boni and Dimikuy just opened.

Are you a FAVL or African village library promoter?

Consider spending $5 to buy a copy of Kathy Knowles latest book, Crocodile Bread, which FAVL translated into French and Jula for our libraries in Burkina Faso. (Or you can get an English-language version from Kathy's site).

The book makes a great prop when meeting someone that you want to talk to about FAVL and African village libraries, because it communicates easily three things:

1) We care immensely about literacy that is relevant to kids in villages- so we really try hard to have books that are developed for the African village audience, and much less attention is paid to shipping low priority book (my favorite example, bless them, is Berenstein Bears, which just don't travel well). We have several programs that we are developing to be producing even more books like these. We buy books in East Africa from Fountain Publishers and other local presses.

2) We partner with other library support orgs., e.g. Osu Children's Library Fund, African Library project, Under the Reading Tree, etc. We're "Friends", not jealous friends...

3) Kids in African villages love reading just as much as kids anywhere! It is hard to convey that in an office in New York, but when someone sees the books they immediately start smiling and thinking about a kid in a village reading...

Students in Burkina Faso...

I just got off a Skype call with Amy Reggio and Madelyn Bagby, two university students spending part of the summer working with the libraries in Burkina. They just returned from about 10 days in the villages. Everything went splendidly, and in particular they did a lot of reading with kids, including Crocodile Bread. They also took a lot of photos, and now will prepare a number of books: mothers and daughters working together in the village; a profile of the village midwife; girls and their favorite books. They are also preparing a book on their travels in Dogon country, which should be really neat. So expect to see some great children's books in the coming months. Someone had asked me some time ago about a $200 project, and here it is: $200 will pay for about 50 copies of one of these books, which would mean we could get it to many more libraries in Burkina. So if you want to donate to produce books (and we'll send you a signed copy of one of the books! how's that for an incentive) make your check out to FAVL and write "Microbook production, Burkina" in the memo line.

Children's book illustrator from Congo

Click here for a Flash of some illustrations from the work, lovely, really, of Dominique Mwankumi.

UgCLA forms agreement with UTRT

UTRT (Under The Reading Tree) is an organization based in Vancouver that, like FAVL, promotes community libraries in Africa. It is already supporting three libraries in Uganda and is just about to take on a fourth. Also like FAVL, it is conscientious about keeping in touch with its libraries and making sure that the funding it provides is sensibly used. Two of UTRT’s directors, Nate Lepp and Jonathan Nikkel, were here in Uganda last April, and we at the Uganda Community Libraries Association spent a lot of time talking with them. The upshot was that UTRT asked us to help supervise their libraries, in return for their paying Grace Musoke, our coordinator, for two days’ work a week. UTRT has just formalized the deal, and we expect the first installment of funds early in July. We all win from this arrangement: Grace can at last earn a living wage since she will be working nearly full time; UTRT will get better reporting from its libraries; and the libraries will receive their funds more regularly and will have more advice and support. Even UgCLA’s other member libraries, though not directly supported by UTRT, will benefit. Grace will be able to do work for them in combination with her UTRT work, and we are already developing reporting instruments and mechanisms for UTRT libraries that can be extended to others. So thank you, Under The Reading Tree! And please visit their website at www.underthereadingtree.org.

The fourth library mentioned above is the Randa Farmers Library about which Mukhobeh Moses wrote to FAVL, as well as to UTRT and OCF, three or four months ago. I went to visit last April, as we all agreed I should, and recommended that OCF give it some books and UTRT some support for a librarian. The books will arrive in August when my friend Valeda has agreed to bring them, and our agreement with UTRT includes a part-time librarian’s salary for Randa. I’m going there tomorrow with Mukhobeh so will be able to give the farmers the glad news and hand over a children’s dictionary that I bought with the first installment of the book grant that UTRT has also budgeted for them. This is a terrific model, I think, of cooperation among organizations interested in libraries.

The weekend’s travelling will also include a visit to a school in Manafwa District, near the Kenya border, where the director, a friend of Mukhobeh’s, proposes to set up a library. Then I’ll visit the school in Bududa town where Emily Soeder, another person who’s been corresponding with FAVL, has also set up one. That’s a school rather than a community library, but we’ve been corresponding quite a bit since she’s been asking me for advice on library organization etc.. Unfortunately, she’s away this weekend, but I spoke to her on the phone, and she’s arranging for others to meet me. Then, on the way back, I’ll visit Busolwe, where the first library in our Library 2 Library scheme is located (it’s one of the two that Espen visited), and I will drop in on two of the recipients of our small grants – one, at Kamuli, because I’ve never been there, and the other, at Njeru, because it, alone of all the recipients, had not when last visited spent the grant as it was supposed to; I trust I’ll find that it has done so by now, since otherwise I will have to ask for the money back.

Update from Kate: I’ve just visited Busolwe, which is the first library (and the only one so far) in our Library 2 Library scheme. They received their grant at the beginning of this month and, as it happens, a group of volunteers from the University of British Columbia. The librarian and volunteers together are effecting a wonderful transformation in the place. They’ve opened up a new reading room and have decorated it with a beautiful mural; they’ve instituted a reading club; and they’re still taking books round to primary schools. Since the workshop that we had there last April primary school teachers have been coming much more often to the library – though the number of actual members (i.e. who’ve paid their subscription) remains small.

6. My UN friends are proposing an Event at the UN at the beginning of October on behalf of the Kitengesa Community Library. I’m hoping that it will raise enough to complete our building project. The computer centre and library room are now almost complete, with only windows and a ceiling to put in. Then we must buy the necessary solar equipment, most of which should be paid for by the grant that we expect any day now from the University of British Columbia’s Go Global Program. My friend Eric Morrow of the Maendeleo Foundation (www.maendeleo.org) hopes to be able to contribute some computers from the grant that he has got from Intel.

E-waste in Ghana... looks good

Thought you might be interested in the following:
Be sure to tune into the next episode of PBS's Frontline for their segment titled, "Ghana: Digital Dumping Ground" this upcoming Tuesday, June 23rd at 9:00 p.m ET. Click here to check local listings and to see a preview.

HT: Chad Raphael

I believe in libraries

“I don’t believe in colleges and universities. I believe in libraries..."
- Ray Bradbury

Interesting article in today's NYTimes on Ray Bradbury's passion for supporting libraries:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/20/us/20ventura.html?hp

Ht: Jonathan Harris

French BD classic: L'heritier (Largo Winch)

Largo Winch is the inheritor of one of the world's largest fortunes... but he's irrepressibly cool and adventurous... and someone is always trying to kill him. Action-packed BD that can be read in an enjoyable 30 minutes... like watching a TV show. What I don't get is how or why anyone would pay $15 for something like this- you can watch any TV show for free and get the same entertainment value. I guess kids like Elliot read them multiple times (E read all the Tintin ones dozens of times). So I suppose on a per read basis it turns out to under a dollar. Not so bad. Good fun, and wonderful graphics.

Why am I blogging about this on FAVL site? Few American readers know that BD are the literature of choice over there in francophone West Africa. I find it fascinating how graphic novels never really caught on in the U.S. QWERTY anyone?

What kinds of books are stocked in the libraries in Burkina Faso?

We're trying to get away from Berenstein Bears... so not surprising that you've probably never heard of any of these that were a selection of books purchased for the Steve Cisler Memorial Library in Dimikuy, which is about to open sometime this month. We're waiting for the "tile"... yes, in a complete innovation for a village in Burkina, part of the outdoor reading area is going to have tiled benches... more confortable and durable and aesthetic than just plain cemented mud-brick benches... we saw a lot of tilework during our trip to Dakar last November, and Koura Donkoui, our local rep. southwestern Burkina, decided to give it a try... just one more little innovation... we'll see how it works!

Titre	Auteur
Le seigneur de la danse	Veronique Tadjo
Thieni Ghanani	CEDA
Fati n'est plus triste	EDICEF
La revanche de Sonko-le-lievre	EDICEF
Kayeli	Chantal Iritie Boan Lou
Mificao	Marie-Danielle Aka
Une cueillette ratee	O.J.R.Georges Bada
Mais qu'est-ce qu'il y a Dodo?	O.J.R.Georges Bada, Hector D. Sonon
Louty, l'enfant du village	Fatou Ndiaye Sow
Akissi reine d'une nuit	Annick Assemian
Bouh et la vache magique	Abdourahman A. Waberi, Pascale Bougeault
La carapace perdue	Assamala Amoi, Benjamin Kouadio Kouakou
Louba le petit footballeur	Sanodji Yombel Abiathar, Adi Moussa
Afi et le tambour magique	Thecla Midiohouan, Hector D. Sonon
Pourquoi je ne suis pas sur la photo?	Kidi Beby, Christian Kinge Epanya
Landisoa et les trois cailloux	Raharimanana, Jean A. Ravelona
Les jeunes detectives	Yaw Ababio Boateng
La hyene affamee	Stella Katengesya
Legendes africaines	Bernard B. Dadie
La potion magique	Inna Hampateba
La legende de sadjo	Isaie Biton Koulibaly
La belle tella	CEDA
Le garcon qui chevaucha un lion	James Ngumy
Sauvee par les animaux	Pere Castor Flammarion
L'ane au crottin d'or	Yves Pinguilly
Le Sida et autres affaires le concernant	CEDA
L'enfant et l'oeil du ciel	Ansomwin Ignace Hien
Les colombes de la paix	Ansomwin Ignace Hien
Lucy la grand-tante de l'humanite	Anne-Sophie Chilard, Claire Mobio
Le grand combat	Michael Cullup
Sarraounia la reine magicienne du Niger	Halima Hamdane, Isabelle Calin
Neka va au marche	Ifeoma Okoye
Kimboo contre la drogue	Liliana Lombardo, Kolo Toure, Basile Boli
Premiere rencontres avec Jesus	Irene Mieth
Le Club des Cinq en vacances	Enid Blyton
Princesse Zelina le rosier magique	Bruno Muscat, Edith
Karateka	Yves-Marie Clement
Un pantalon pour papa	Angela Shelf Medearis, John Ward
Conte de la marguerite	Beatrice Appia
Jack et le haricot magique	Marlene Jobert
La main sacree de metallica	Usinor Sacilor
Donito la sirene des caraibes	Conrad
Georges, ver de terre	Bruno Heitz
A la decouverte de l'anglais sur les traces de Timothy	J.C. Sentenac
Un jour dans la foret	Hemma
Le petit Dragon qui ne savait pas moucher	Odile Delattre, Benoit Rondia
Contes des peuples de l'U.R.S.S.	Robert Babloian

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak

I'm trying to get a collection of books together for the students who will be going to Burkina Faso on the Reading West Africa study abroad program... in particular books about the power of books, or the nature of reading itself, just so even in their leisure reading the students are thinking about the importance of libraries and especially the transformative power of fiction. So in that vein I read The Book Thief. I can't recall who suggested it to me. I'm not sure the writing is Coetzee-quality (but then what is?) but the story definitely makes this a perfect leisure reading book. Grim, but not so grim as The Road. Nor, for that matter, as grim as Uwem Akpan's short story, Fattening for Gabon, which the more I think about it is truly a brilliant piece of ethnographic fiction... the character of Fofo, the uncle, is so sharply drawn it almost brings tears just to think about him.

Anyway, I strongly recommend The Book Thief for adults and readers above age 12 who are able to appreciate very strong images of death and suffering; the book is about the grim life of a young girl growing up in a small town in Germany during WWII... lots of death all around. Indeed, the narrator is Death, a clever device.

For your enjoyment... some photos from Dogon country on the Mali-Burkina border

Amy Reggio, a student at Santa Clara University who was studying abroad in Dakar and who is now in Burkina Faso working on developing a number of children's books for the libraries, sent us some amazing pictures from her trip to Dogon country. Stunning.

Anne-Reed - FAVL volunteer- explains some of her activities

It is a great presentation, but one little caveat- at one point she has a "speako" that the cost of printing books is 20 cents... it is more like $7 for each... with small print runs.

Books for South Sudan

Teresa Jolly Holt sent us the following:

Subject: Library books

Dear Teresa,
We are a recent faith based organisation in southern sudan. WE are a
group of religiuos congregations living and working in Upper Nile State in
Souhtern Sudan. WE are having Inservice teacher training programmes for
prmary teachers. But the dire need is teaching English and the non
availability of English reading material is a drawback. We woud be grateful
if we could know how and what we do to apply for books from your resources.

Our mail address is:

Rev. Vincent Mojowk
Bishop's House,
Catholic Church
Malakal
Uper Nile State
Southern Sudan

The good people at African Library Project and Books for Africa are the best NGOs for this type of request... they do great work.

[in French] Praise for Kathy Knowles' new book, Crocodile Bread

lliteracy rates in West Africa

DAKAR, 22 April 2009 (IRIN) - Illiteracy rates in West Africa are the highest in the world, cramping development and weakening citizens’ power to effect socio-economic and political change, say education agencies, who are calling on governments and donors to step up literacy and education efforts.

Sixty-five million West African adults – 40 percent of the adult population – cannot read or write according to a new study, 'From closed books to open doors – West Africa's literacy challenge'.

Of the 10 countries with the world’s lowest recorded adult – 15 and older – literacy rates, seven are in West Africa: Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Sierra Leone, the report says.

"Tens of millions of non-literate women, men and young people in West Africa are trapped behind closed doors, excluded from the living standards, educational opportunities, and democratic power that are their rights," said Mahamadou Cheick Diarra, coordinator of the African Platform for Adult Education (Pamoja).

“People [in West Africa] cannot access jobs or economic or technical opportunities that have been shown all over the world to be driving development," said the report’s author, Oxfam West Africa advocacy coordinator Caroline Pearce.

Read the full article here...

Anecdotes about books making a difference...

From the NY Times...

Of course, it wasn’t the encyclopedia itself, or the encyclopedia alone, that may made the difference in Sonia Sotomayor’s life. More important was the value placed on learning that led her family to shell out nearly $400 for the Britannica in the first place. And, as Judge Sotomayor has made clear, credit must be given to the Nancy Drew mysteries, which inspired her, she has said, to become a lawyer, so it wasn’t only the Britannica that inspired her.

The story of the little girl reading the Britannica in her Bronx housing project is a perfect example of America’s most treasured narrative of success, treasured, precisely because, for many people, it was true.

It’s Abe Lincoln reading everything he could get his hands on, in part to compensate for his lack of formal schooling. Now it’s Sonia Sotomayor, being raised by a determined, hard-working widow (for whom a $400 encyclopedia must have represented a tremendous financial sacrifice) reading the Britannica in a neighborhood where few if any other people valued it as much as her mother did.

“The Britannica was a physical embodiment of the existence of a serious world where there was a lot to be learned beyond one’s own experience,” Randall Stross, author of the books “The Microsoft Way” and “Planet Google” (and an occasional contributor to The New York Times), said in a telephone conversation. “Just having it on the shelf was a way to remind kids of the importance of education, and it was a counterweight to all the trivial and even dangerous pursuits that surrounded them.”

A library for Pobe Mengao, in Burkina Faso

Emilie Crofton, a dynamic Peace Corps volunteer in northern Burkina Faso, is working closely with the community of Pobe to get a library started. She's launched a blog and will be working with FAVL to get the library operational. The community already has a mueum (pictured) which is really neat. I can't wait to visit!

Here's how Emilie describes her work and the village:

My name is Emilie Crofton, from San Jose California. I am currently serving in the Peace Corps in Burkina Faso. I am volunteering as a Girls Education and Empowerment volunteer in the village of Pobe Mengao, located in the Soum province about 25k south of Djibo. The commune of Pobe Mengao has roughly 6,000 people. There is a local health clinic, primary, secondary and Franco-Arab school. Pobe's population is made up of Mossi, Peul and Korumba ethnicities. The Korumbas speak Korumfe, a local language that is slowly dying off and the village is fighting to keep alive. In 2004 a German NGO helped create a small museum in the village to help preserve the Korumba culture.

Fiction from Sudan,,, Leila Aboulela, The Translator

Oddly enough, I'd just been talking with a friend about the apparent lack of Sudanese novelists accessible to English-speaking readers, apart from the recently deceased Tayeb Salih, and I literally "randomly" picked this novel from the stacks at my neighborhood library- I was browsing in the fiction section looking for African writers.

Judging from Aboulela's biography and an interview, it is a very personal novel. Definitely gives a perspective on Islam that you will not find in most novels. More Graham Greenish in it's explicit invocation of faith and crisis of faith (in religion, in one's self). She's an excellent writer, though not the same caliber as Salih, Achebe, Okri, Coetzee, etc., but then again, who is? I recommend the novel- it is short... but in full disclosure have to add that I was in the end disappointed. The ending is very pat. There was one wonderful passage, though. One about how Sammar, the main character, reconnects with her son who she hadn't seen in four years. I loved Aboulela's description of Sammar holding her son, now older, and playing "baby" with him, the only time he allows himself to enjoy that special intimacy between parent and child. Very moving.

What to do in summer reading camp? Collage!

Sare Elisee worked with some kids in Sumbrungu library, Ghana how to do it when he was there last May. He called the picture "fly eagle fly" and it's what we want kids to do!

Waah, why couldn't I be there....

A party to celebrate English and German translation of BD illustrated by Pov (left) and written by Jean-Claude de l`Estrac (right).

The amazing power of Lois Lowry

So I just paused for breath and found that I had read 123 pages of the semi-sequel to The Giver, entitled Gathering Blue. So far it is a beautiful children's story. It is a truism that the best stories always involve an orphan with a special destiny, who hears the voice of her mother in her dreams and times of stress, calmly evoking the warmth of the hearth. But Lowry takes that commonplace and makes you want to be that orphan.

Research based education programming

I found this blog post on a recent column by David Brooks to be very interesting. As FAVL moves increasingly into evaluation of programs, it is worth bearing in mind that even the best program evaluators (i.e. Fryer) can be subject to lots of immodestly... All of it worth keeping in mind the next time you read a study about the amazing power of books.

Just How Gullible Is David Brooks?
Gotham Schools ^ | 8 May 2009 | Aaron Pallas

Posted on Monday, May 11, 2009 4:46:09 PM by Bob017

Now that I have your attention … Today’s New York Times column by David Brooks touts a new study by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) Promise Academy charter schools, two celebrated schools in Harlem. Fryer and Dobbie’s finding that the typical eighth-grader was in the 74th percentile among New York City students in mathematics leads Brooks to state that HCZ Promise Academy eliminated the black-white achievement gap. He’s so dumbstruck by this that he says it twice. Brooks takes this evidence as support for the “no excuses” model of charter schools, and, claiming that “the approach works,” challenges all cities to adopt this “remedy for the achievement gap.”

Coming on the heels of yesterday’s release of the 2009 New York State English Language Arts (ELA) results, in which the HCZ schools outperformed the citywide white average in grade 3, but were well behind the white average in grades 4, 5 and 8, skoolboy decided to drink a bit more deeply from the datastream. The figure below shows the gap between the average performance in HCZ Promise Academy and white students in New York City in ELA and math, expressed as a fraction of the standard deviation of overall performance in a given grade and year. The left side of the figure shows math performance, and the right side shows ELA performance.

It’s true that eighth-graders in 2008 scored .20 standard deviations above the citywide average for white students. But it may also be apparent that this is a very unusual pattern relative to the other data represented in this figure, all of which show continuing and sizeable advantages for white students in New York City over HCZ students. The fact that HCZ seventh-graders in 2008 were only .3 standard deviations behind white students citywide in math is a real accomplishment, and represents a shrinkage of the gap of .42 standard deviations for these students in the preceding year. However, Fryer and Dobbie, and Brooks in turn, are putting an awful lot of faith in a single data point — the remarkable increase in math scores between seventh and eighth grade for the students at HCZ who entered sixth grade in 2006. If what HCZ is doing can routinely produce a .67 standard deviation shift in math test scores in the eighth grade, that would be great. But we’re certainly not seeing an effect of that magnitude in the seventh grade. And, of course, none of this speaks to the continuing large gaps in English performance.

But here’s the kicker. In the HCZ Annual Report for the 2007-08 school year submitted to the State Education Department, data are presented on not just the state ELA and math assessments, but also the Iowa Test of Basic Skills. Those eighth-graders who kicked ass on the state math test? They didn’t do so well on the low-stakes Iowa Tests. Curiously, only 2 of the 77 eighth-graders were absent on the ITBS reading test day in June, 2008, but 20 of these 77 were absent for the ITBS math test. For the 57 students who did take the ITBS math test, HCZ reported an average Normal Curve Equivalent (NCE) score of 41, which failed to meet the school’s objective of an average NCE of 50 for a cohort of students who have completed at least two consecutive years at HCZ Promise Academy. In fact, this same cohort had a slightly higher average NCE of 42 in June, 2007.

Normal Curve Equivalents (NCE’s) range from 1 to 99, and are scaled to have a mean of 50 and a standard deviation of 21.06. An NCE of 41 corresponds to roughly the 33rd percentile of the reference distribution, which for the ITBS would likely be a national sample of on-grade test-takers. Scoring at the 33rd percentile is no great success story.

How are we to make sense of this? One possibility is that the HCZ students didn’t take the Iowa tests seriously, and that their performance on that test doesn’t reflect their true mastery of eighth-grade mathematics. The HCZ Annual Report doesn’t offer this as a possibility, perhaps because it would be embarrassing to admit that students didn’t take some aspect of their schoolwork and school accountability plan seriously. But the three explanations that are offered are not compelling: the Iowa test skills were not consistently aligned with the New York State Standards and the Harcourt Curriculum used in the school; the linkage of classroom instruction to the skills tested on the Iowa test wasn’t consistent across the school year, and Iowa test prep began in February, 2008; and school staff didn’t use 2007 Iowa test results to identify areas of weaknesses for individual students and design appropriate intervention.

If proficiency in English and math are to mean anything, these skills have to be able to generalize to contexts other than a particular high-stakes state test. No college or employer is ever going to look at the New York State ELA and math exams in making judgments about who has the skills to be successful in their school or workplace. I’m going to hold off labeling the HCZ schools as the “Harlem Miracle” until there’s some additional evidence supporting the claim that these schools have placed their students on a level academic playing field with white students in New York City.
1 posted on Monday, May 11, 2009 4:46:09 PM by Bob017

And killjoy Charles Murray (who I always understood to be a little weird) actually posted a sensible comment

I’m not being mindlessly pessimistic. The problem is that we have had 40 years of “Miracle in X”—the early Head Start results, the Milwaukee Project, Perry Preschool, the Abecedarian Project, Marva Collins’s schools, and the Infant Health Development Project, to name some of the most widely known stories—and the history is depressingly consistent: an initial research report gets ecstatic attention in the press, then a couple of years later it turns out that the miracle is, at best, a marginal success that is not close to the initial claims.
I haven’t seen the study by Roland Fryer and Will Dobbie that was the basis for Brooks’s column, but if I’m going to be such a grinch I might as well lay out the kinds of things I will be looking for (these are generic issues, not things that I necessarily think are problems with this particular study) when I get hold of a copy:

1. Selection factors among the students. Did the program deal with a representative sample? Was random assignment used?
2. Comparison group. Who’s in it? Are they comparable to the students in the experimental group?
3. Attrition. What about the students who started the program but dropped out? How many were there? How were they doing when they dropped out?
4. Teaching to the test. After seven years of No Child Left Behind, everybody knows about this one. Worse, there are the school officials who have rigged attendance on the day the test was taken or simply faked the scores—that’s been happening too with high stakes testing.
5. Cherry-picking. Do the reported test scores include all of the tests that the students took, or just the ones that make the program look good?
6. The tests. Do they meet ordinary standards for statistical reliability, predictive validity, etc.
7. Fade-out. Large short-term test score improvements have, without exception to date, faded to modest ones within a few years.”

Georgia teacher helps out!

Teacher Nancy Wilson and her mother recently partnered with African Library Project and FAVL to send off almost 80 boxes of high quality children's books that Nancy had been collecting following decades of service as an elementary school teacher. The books are now en route via container to school libraries being setup under a program organized by African Library Project and their local NGO partners. if you are a teacher or student in the U.S. and want to organize book drives for English-speaking libraries in Africa, then definitely get in touch with ALP- they are doing great work. And don;t let me not mention Books for Africa, another great organization that helps supply all sorts of libraries with books.

News from Uganda

Kate Parry writes:

Some good news. I’ve recently met two young men who have already launched library projects. The first is David Ssemwogerere, who heard about us through Mukhobeh Moses of the Randa Farmers Library. He runs an NGO called D+ (Development Plus) Uganda, which has teamed up with an Australian group called HUG (Help Us Grow -- www.hug.or.au) to establish the Suubi Community Centre, which does all sorts of things but includes a library, at Lubanda village in Kisekka sub-county in Masaka District (one of my relatives lives in that sub-county). The second is Simon Mugabi, a friend of David’s, who is working for Unicef at present in Kenya but is coming home at the end of this year and is well ahead with plans for establishing a Community Empowerment and Development Centre (including a library) at Lwampanga trading centre in Nakasongola District. He, too, has support from abroad – in this case from an American woman named Lori Peacock, who has set up a not-for-profit called Nziza (www.nziza.org) to work in Rwanda and Uganda. Both of them are eager to join UgCLA and have already paid their subscriptions! I’ve sent David the application form and will send Simon his now. I’ve also been in correspondence with Helen Brown, or HUG and hope to meet her when she comes to Uganda next month; and I will write to Lori Peacock to suggest she work with both FAVL and Ready to Read, which is the organization set up by my friend who’s working on libraries in Rwanda. Both David and Simon seem to be very able and experienced and will I’m sure be good contacts for us, as Board members, perhaps, in future, and as facilitators of workshops. So, Grace, expect their application forms, and remind me to give you the 40,000/=.

Simon’s CEDC is library member number 28, Ggaba is still in line to join (Mary is just raising the money from library subscriptions), and we still have all those libraries in Toro lining up (I’ll be writing to them soon). So I’m sure we will have more than 30 libraries by the end of the year.

Librarian trainings and workshops...

FAVL hosts the occasional workshop- it is a necessary part of any enterprise, and the issue is when is it taken to excess. (Many of my university colleagues know what I mean!) I found the following paragraphs from Susan Watkins and Ann Swidler particularly blunt:

(i) Training and the ‘‘Workshop Mentality”
In Malawi as elsewhere Sub-Saharan Africa, the supply of
‘‘training” has created a huge demand. In an incisive analysis
of family planning programs in Nigeria, Daniel Jordan Smith
(2003) has described the ‘‘workshop mentality,” arguing that
training and workshops provide the ideal intersection of donor
and recipient interests. Donors can believe they are doing something
self-renewing by providing training, while workshop facilitators
can build their patronage ties by providing access to the
per diems, travel allowances, and opportunities for networking
that workshops provide. But we argue that the predominance of
‘‘training” as a core donor-sponsored activity also arises from
the constraints of the sustainability doctrine. If donors are supposed
to help, but without funding substantive programs that
could breed dependency, then training and workshops are the
ideal donor-funded activity: experts will teach people skills, or
better yet teach them to teach skills, which will provide all with
the capacity to provide for their own needs.

The logic of sustainability reinforces the interstitial elites’
commitment to esoteric knowledge. If funders will not finance
substantive projects (VCT, nutrition supplements, paid healthcare
workers, paid teachers or counselors) on an on-going basis
because they would not be sustainable, then ‘‘training” is
one of the only fundable activities. And what is all that training
to consist of? Since the training is in some ways an end in
itself for both donors and those trained, the content of the
training becomes elaborate formalizations of what would
otherwise be common sense.

Swidler, A., & Watkins, S.C., ‘‘Teach a Man to Fish”: The Sustainability Doctrine and Its ..., World Development (2009), doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2008.11.002

I will add that a refrain that I hear myself repeating to a lot to potential library funders etc is, "It's not that hard to run a village library... a week working in one of our libraries is enough to get all the basic skills for administration." The harder part- storytelling, leading book discussions, imparting the love of reading, animation- is probably better imparted through one-on-one that through a formal workshop. Lots of learning by doing is needed.

World Music interlude... Amadou and Miriam from Mali

Chinua Achebe: Girls at War and Other Stories.

I've been reading Chinua Achebe's 1972 collection Girls at War and Other Stories. Beautifully written stories written mostly in his youth. The stories themselves often end abruptly; he had not mastered the art of the final twist that is so appealing of the short story format. But the excellence of writing is so very much there.

[French] Remerciement de Lecteur de Koumbia, Burkina Faso

Je tiens à vous féliciter tout d’abords pour cette idée à la fois géniale et généreuse de mettre cette bibliothèque si fournie dans cette commune de Koumbia, mais surtout de répondre au besoin si grandissant de nos frères et sœurs en livres d’études et de sensibilisation de la jeunesse (surtout pour les écoliers et les collégiens).

Nous, travailleurs de la commune, partageons aussi ce bonheur. Moi en particulier, en plus d’être profondément touché par votre geste, je trouve en cette bibliothèque d’ailleurs à côté de chez moi, une merveille, j’allais dire une divine providence dans laquelle je ne me fais pas prier. Cette bibliothèque me permet de me cultiver, mais aussi de dompter ma solitude surtout que je viens d’arriver dans cette commune où je ne connaissais personne. Je vous en suis très reconnaissant.

Je souhaiterais néanmoins que cette bibliothèque soit agrandie dans la mesure du possible avec votre soutien.

Merci pour votre attention.

Alexandre Sawadogo

Technicien Supérieur d’Agriculture

en service a Koumbia