GBA Steering Committee member All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development (ACR:GCD), has recently announced important progress on one of GBA’s flagship initiatives, the Begin with Books prize, with the contribution of age-appropriate early grade reading content related to Covid-19 to the Global Digital Library. ACR:GCD is jointly funded by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), World Vision, and the Australian Government Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT).
The materials are unique in two ways. 1) they address the Covid-19 pandemic in ways that are accessible to the earliest readers and 2) they have been produced or translated into languages that are traditionally underserved.
The languages are:
With more to come in November, including:
Soninke
Senoufu
These languages are spoken in the following countries:
Fiji, Indonesia, Laos, Malawi, Mali, Nepal, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, Samoa, and Somalia.
The Covid-19 content is also available in bridge languages English and French, which makes them more easily translatable into yet further languages.
The addition of these books has brought the number of available languages on the Global Digital Library up to over 70, and many of these languages are traditionally underserved.
To learn more about the initiative, the books, and how you can help spread the word to reach the children who speak these languages, read the full announcement.