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Doran Isaacs Talks to Business Day about the Desperate Need for Libraries
Doran Isaacs follows the uplifting story of Nokubonga Yawa who was in Grade 9 when she fell pregnant. She had to leave school to give birth to her daughter, Sinaye.Now as a 22 year old HIV-positive single mother, Yawa works at Equal Education (EE), an advocacy group that organises youth, parents, teachers and community members to transform education through active involvement at school level, and nationally through campaigns such as the current Campaign for School Libraries. At weekends Yawa is often filming on location, as host of Siyanqoba-Beat It, SA’s most important HIV-education TV show. Her daughter, Sinaye, who is HIV-negative , is now six.
This year she started Grade 1 at Mountain Road Primary, a school with a diverse student body and a good standard of education, at Woodstock in Cape Town. As a Grade 1 at Mountain Road she reads two books a week. The two weekly books her daughter’s school bag contains amaze Yawa. She remembers being in Grade 1 and having one or two books for the entire year, a reality that still pertains in many township schools.
The national picture is bleak. Only 8% of public schools have functioning libraries. The results are obvious. In the decade’s main sub-Saharan African study of 14 countries, SA ranked ninth behind countries including Mozambique and Swaziland. As is often discussed in Yawa’s youth group, there is no single solution to our education crisis.
Libraries are one thing that work. The world’s largest school library study, conducted in Colorado, showed that Grade 4 reading ability improves by an average 18% when a functioning library is added to a school.
At EE everyone helps out opening the letters and petitions that arrive from all parts of the country in support of the call for school libraries. Yawa recently opened this one from Shihlobyeni Primary School in Limpopo: “Our school has been without a library since 1940 when it was established. It has been difficult to improve the culture of reading in this rural community. It is our resolve as educators, parents, learners and the entire school community to request government to establish a library.”
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