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INTRODUCTION TO THE GLOBAL BOOK ALLIANCE

JULIANNA NIELSEN, SENIOR INTERNATIONAL TECHNICAL ADVISOR,

EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT CENTER

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Partnership of donor agencies, multilateral institutions, and civil society organizations
Brings together global partners to end illiteracy to better address the growing book gap challenge

Global Book Alliance

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GBA VISION/MISSION

OUR VISION

A world in which all children achieve literacy and have access to quality books in a language that they understand, with which they can learn to read, read to learn, and develop a love of reading.

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Global Book Alliance Flagship Initiatives

Global Digital Library

https://digitallibrary.io/

Supply Chain Analyses
Training for education sector partners on supply chain issues
Micro-initiatives to address specific issues within the book supply chain

Flagship initiatives of GBA include:
Supply Chain Analyses. We are conducting analyses of the book sector, through research primarily focused on stakeholder interviews, in various countries, in order to better understand the challenges and issues that are faced. The research is specifically looking at Essential Reading Materials – by which the GBA means decodable readers, levelled readers and general children’s books. So we are focused on early grade reading books.
Global Digital Library –Funded by Norway through Norad, the GDL hosts open source materials in a wide variety of languages.
The third objective is to conduct training on issues from across the book supply chain – which may come from the SCA research or be identified through other means. Training includes partners from Ministries of Education, the private sector as well as USAID missions and Implementing Partners.
Micro initiatives – also coming out of the SCAs are specific activities that are identified as opportunities to help improve the supply of reading materials. For example we are working on National Book Policies with the Ministries of Education in Malawi and Zambia..

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Mali, Malawi, and Tanzania
Work with private sector publishers
Initial in-person training of publishers by national and international experts
Followed by coaching to produce books: 21 titles in Mali in Bamanankan, 50 titles in Malawi in Chichewa, 10 titles in Tanzania in Kiswahili
Used the Room to Read REACH South Africa model of RBF
Selected publishers were paid a fee, based on deliverable, for development of books
Advocacy efforts to raise awareness among Ministry officials of need for high-quality children’s books

Publisher Trainings

I will focus now a bit on our publisher trainings, which incorporate the principle of results-based financing. We in fact designed our trainings on the RTR REACH South Africa project. Alison Ziki graciously met with us and offered his advice and project documents, so I am very happy to see that you will be hearing from him later. We also looked at the Canadian NGO and GBA partner CODE’s work in Tanzania, where they supported local publishers through trainings and by subsidizing purchasing power, guaranteeing the purchase of a certain number of titles.

For our projects in Mali, Malawi and Tanzania, we first held a general training, followed by individual coaching. For selected publishers, we established a deliverables contract to submit books at various stages (generally, manuscript, illustrations, designed pages). In turn, the publishers were expected to establish their own deliverables contracts with authors and illustrators. All payments were based on completion of work and submission of high-quality deliverables. Publishers retained copyright on the books, but were required to open license the printed copies funded by USAID.

We are also carrying out advocacy campaigns with the Ministries of Education in each country to persuade them that ERMs should be included in their planning and procurement process, along with textbooks. We believe that a healthy, robust, and thriving private sector publishing environment is critical to the development of a reading culture. We encourage governments to consider private publishers as an important partner in the provision of books, both textbooks and other reading materials. We are encouraging new and innovative thinking about how systems can transform themselves in order to get more books to children in the lower grades so they can learn to read.

In conclusion, I would like to show a brief one-minute video of our recent book project in Mali.

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THE GLOBAL BOOK ALLIANCE

WWW.GLOBALBOOKALLIANCE.ORG/

ADMIN@GLOBALBOOKALLIANCE.ORG

JULIANNA NIELSEN, SENIOR INTERNATIONAL TECHNICAL ADVISOR,

EDUCATION DEVELOPMENT CENTER

JNIELSEN@EDC.ORG