Giving the Gift of Literacy! The Christianna Foundation Needs Your Help to Promote Education in Nigeria
The Christianna Foundation is launching its most ambitious charity project yet, and need your help to make it happen.
The Christianna Foundation is a charity that focuses on bringing quality, equitable education to the children of Nigeria. Through their efforts, they help provide primary schools with the resources, facilities and teacher training they need to improve literacy rate & empower children.
With the dawn of the Coronavirus, schools were shut down and posed an advancing threat to the already threatened level of education in Nigeria. Currently, Nigeria has the highest amount of out-of-school children in the world. This is why the Christianna Foundation is working to give children a reason to return to school through the launch of its Book Box Library Club (BBLC).
The Book Box Club aims to support 102 under-resourced primary schools in rural Nigerian, starting in Ona-Ara, Oya State with relevant materials. These materials include storybooks for children aged 4 to 12 in both English and Yoruba. Working from within primary schools and with teachers, Christianna Foundation will host events and competitions, develop learning activities, and support a Community Reading Mentor Scheme. Books that are borrowed will be used at school with a guaranteed 15-minutes reading time per day and can be taken home to promote reading for pleasure beyond the school environment.
More than 16,000 children have already benefited from projects that the charity has run within schools in South-West Nigeria, these include the building of nine school libraries and the implementation of Worldreader’s eReader programme in three schools. This newest project sees Christianna Foundation continue to support the United Nations Global Goal 4, to provide quality, equitable education for all children.
Book Box Library Club will be free to use for both children and schools. Pop-up library days will be hosted at each school every two weeks, allowing children to borrow between 20 and 40 storybooks per year. The Library Club will kick off with training days on ‘Caring for Your Library Books’ and, to help them love their books, every child will be presented with their very own beautifully designed, water and dust resistant book bag, a gift which is theirs to keep.
Rebecca Farmer, UK Director of Christianna Foundation, said: “The pilot phase for Book Box Library Club began in January 2020, before Covid-19 saw all schools shut down. We are more committed than ever to start the new academic year in September by supporting children in under-resourced rural schools with the books and materials they need to succeed in achieving literacy.
Nigeria has been included in a list of 12 countries most at risk of falling even further behind with education targets following the pandemic. Many of these children have had no access to computers and online-teaching, their education has been completely disrupted. Already unfairly disadvantaged by a lack of resources, the education of these vulnerable children will be especially impacted by the Coronavirus. We know that children who left school so suddenly may not come back, especially girls, and we want to give them every incentive to continue their education. We believe that being given access to books and reading materials that they have never had before will be just the kind of incentive they need and give them a chance to bridge the growing attainment gap.
We need corporates and civil society to get involved. The crisis is too large and time-critical for the government alone to tackle. We can’t leave this generation of children behind, they need their community to support them, their global community”.
If you are a corporation or individual who would like to assist in helping make this project a firm reality, contact rebecca@christiannafoundation.org, or to sponsor a class or donate a book bundle, please visit https://christiannafoundation.org/
