One hundred colourful stories for rural kids
One hundred colourful, new children’s books have just landed on the desk of the Baobab Foundation. These books are for our pre-schools in Venda and is published by Book Dash. https://bookdash.org
Book Dash is a South African initiative that believes every child should own one hundred books by the age of five. They gather creative professionals who volunteer to create new, African storybooks and anyone is free to translate, print and distribute them.
Few South African children own books. This contributes to exceptionally low literacy levels country-wide, which in turn, carry a huge cost to the economy. Studies show that improving levels of book ownership from an early age is a low-cost, high impact way of addressing the problem.
Book Dash then designed a publishing model that harnesses professional creative volunteers to vastly reduce the time (instead of the usual 12 days, only 12 hours per booklet!) and costs involved in creating beautiful new books for children. In this way, they put high-quality books in children’s hands and hearts.
One of the books on its way to Venda pre-schools is: “Tshibode tshi wana haya hatsho”, The tortoise who finds its home.
The Baobab Foundation is delighted to have the opportunity to contribute to this brilliant initiative. With R1000 donated by Skoon (https://www.skoonskin.com ) we bought a hundred books to hand out to the pre-schools in rural Venda, some of which are translated into TshiVenda.
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- ”And the tortoise asked the bird, have you seen my home?”
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- “And the tortoise asked the mouse, have you seen my home?”
