Libraries For South African Schools

School children in the Eastern Cape

The vast majority of schools in South Africa have no functional library. Over 60% of schools have no library materials. Of the schools in the Province of the Eastern Cape, for example, 93% do not have a library. Overall, 85 percent of the population of South Africa lives beyond the reach of a public library.

Since democratic elections in 1994, South Africa's government has sought to address the enormous damage to human capital that was a result of more than 300 years of colonial and apartheid rule. Among the many priorities currently being addressed in South Africa's Department of Education, is the institutionalization of policies and programs that will lead to a "culture of learning," including an increased emphasis on improving literacy and reading skills for today's school children — South Africa's future leaders. Yet, for the most part, children in South Africa do not have access to books. In this context, libraries become a critical resource for developing reading skills that will determine a child’s success in school.

To meet this challenge SA Partners has developed a project that will make books more accessible to students in rural schools in the Eastern Cape and train teachers in how to better utilize books and library materials in the classroom. In a first time collaboration, SA Partners brought together representatives from the University of Fort Hare (Library Sciences Department and Distance Learning), the Library and Information Association of South Africa and the Eastern Cape Department of Education's Educational Resources and Information Service Unit to launch its Libraries for South African Schools (LSAS) Program.

The ultimate development goal of the program is to support the establishment of libraries in under-resourced urban, township and rural schools in order to increase student literacy levels, improve teaching methods, and build community support for education reform. This will be accomplished by meeting the following objectives:

• Institutional Capacity Building through the establishment of partnerships and collaborations among government agencies, communities, NGOs and academic institutions in the US and South Africa (an approach SA Partners has used successfully in its health partnerships);
• Teacher Development by providing training in library science for teachers that will manage the school libraries, and training classroom teachers that will utilize the resources of the library to support classroom curricula
• Promote Sustainability by establishing school library committees to address issues of maintenance, expansion, and accountability and to develop community-wide public/private partnerships to advocate for school libraries;
• Stimulate the South African Publishing Industry through the purchase of indigenous books for school libraries.
• Leverage Additional Resources from the US that will support the development of new school libraries in South Africa.