Literacy 101: Send in good books

The question isn’t whether SA can afford to transform literacy — it’s why available solutions remain unimplemented

- Rod Amner

Lucky Xaba, the Humanities librarian at Rhodes University, arrives at a no-fee school in Makhanda to check on the colourful classroom library she and her team built a few months before.

The teacher is absent, but the Grade 1 children are there, reading independently on cushions. These are isiXhosa Grade 1s in a country where only 13% of children who speak an African language can read for meaning by the end of Grade 4.

Xaba’s conclusion: “They are already becoming independent readers because they have access to good books.”

The Rhodes Library and NGOs, the Lebone Centre, have established more than 40 Foundation Phase classroom libraries in Makhanda.

But there are more than 160 FP classrooms in the city. The Eastern Cape Department of Education hasn’t built a single library.

The simple math of access

A classroom library with 100 high-quality books costs about R20 000. Over five years, serving 175 learners, this amounts to R114 per learner, which is less than 7% of the R1 750 annual allocation that the National Education Minister mandates provinces spend per learner.

In the Eastern Cape, the Department of Education (DOE) has withheld a large proportion of the funding from its fee-exempt schools — about R5 billion since 2020 — on the pretext that its “centralised procurement” strategy is providing scaled resources for all schools in the province.

Fewer than 3% of retail book sales for children are in African languages, despite 80% of the population speaking African languages at home. Publishers cite insufficient demand because schools and libraries aren’t buying, creating a vicious cycle.