By Mabinty M. Kamara
Child advocate, Makalay Saidiatu Sonda is calling for support to get a community library for children in Kori Chiefdom in the Southern district of Moyamba.
Mrs Sonda is the Founder and Director of a child advocacy group, Moonteen, a community-based organisation which focuses on the education of teenagers and adolescent boys and girls, with programmes in mentoring and teaching of reproductive health in schools.
Mrs Sonda is also a Teaching and Research Assistant at Njala University, Mokonde campus. Since the closure of schools due to fears of COVID-19, she has set up a book club which has kept children in the community engaged during the long break from school.
She told Politico that the book club was a way of keeping the kids motivated by encouraging them to read together.
“When we realized that schools were closed and majority of the kids were idle in our environment here at Njala and the communities neighbouring Mokonde, we thought it fit that since we had been fighting against teenage pregnancy and with schools closed and we could no longer engage our teenagers and adolescents through schools, we should find a way to keep them busy,” she explained.
Shen then spoke to one of her organisation’s partners, Children Assurance Program Sierra Leone (CAP-SL) who also work in the education field and run a project, through which books were provided to them for community libraries. So they donated six cartoons of books to Moonteen, which they used to start up the Moonteen book club. Sonda said children and teenagers in the community had mostly resorted to helping their parents with business or other daily vocations. She said that even with the availability of books, there are no libraries for children in the community, except the University library which they were not allowed to access.
Sonda and her kids use the veranda of her house to meet and read daily. She now has 45 children registered as part of her book club, a number the space can no longer accommodate.
“For the day, we sometimes have up to 10 kids coming to read and the others will come and borrow the books to read at home. I see that children here have a high interest in reading because the distractions are not many. This is a rural area and there is no electricity outside the campus so there are no movies to watch, no play stations, and majority of them do not have mobile phones,” she explained.
“It will be nice if they [Sierra Leone Library Board] could establish a library here as well because it not just about the urban areas but children in rural areas are also in need and I think they need it the most. Most of them do not have other sources of learning and so I think books are a great source of learning for them and they can also learn about different things outside their school curriculums,” Mrs Sonda added.
The decline in the reading culture in the country has been linked in the past to the poor learning outcomes in most schools in the country. Advocates like Sonda say targeting communities like hers could be a step in reviving the culture of reading in children.
But some wonder why Njala University cannot establish a library for the community in which it is located.
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