By Helena Asamoah-Hassan | Project Leader
Creating awareness of Community Members on Library Services
Chinwe is a member of staff of a big Central Library in Awka, Nigeria. The Library is located at the centre of the town, easily visible and accessible. It accommodates more than 400 users at a time, but the facility was heavily underutilised. It also has an eLibrary that seats 70 people and organises training in digital skills. This training is not subscribed to, and the perception was that the youth were not interested in acquiring digital skills, and the library could do nothing about it.
Chinwe was one of the three librarians from that Library who enrolled for the INELI-SSAf training out of curiosity. The programme ran in 2022 and 2023 and was mostly online. To make them better people and professionals, they were taken through topics including Time Management, Innovation, and Advocacy. However, the training on “Awareness Creation as a Key” caught more of their attention. They were taught that visibility and accessibility of the library building do not indicate an understanding of the services it provides, and that any awareness drive about activities run inside the library through exhibitions, posters, and display boards are primarily for those who are already library users and not for the entire community. This became clearer when the AfLIA facilitator said, ‘people cannot utilise the library when they do not know what the library has to offer’. Her words hit them hard because their library is big and situated at a wonderful location, yet the usage was not as high as expected.
Chinwe and her colleagues were emboldened to try out what they had learned. They brainstormed and came up with the idea to run a sensitisation activity in the community, to raise awareness about the free computer and digital skills acquisition lessons available in the library, with a special training that was to be held on July 25, 2024. They felt that such a programme would catch the attention of people more than telling them about the books on the shelves and other facilities.
The three of them, as a team, enlisted twenty-five (25) other members of staff and some readers interested in the awareness drive for a greater impact. The team then embarked on a campaign starting from the library and going through major streets in the town. They engaged with community members and distributed fliers that they had produced in the library themselves. This was done for two days.
Come the day of the training, the attendance was high, boosted because of the awareness creation they had done. Feedback received from several students who attended the training was that they were successful at the Joint Admission Matriculation Board examination, because computers are used in the examinations. They said that the training on computer appreciation helped them to focus on answering the questions rather than figuring out how to navigate from one part of the computer screen to another or which keys/icons to click on. This feedback was confirmed by five new intakes who attended the next training and identified themselves as siblings of participants in the July 2024 training. In addition, the library received feedback from three participants who said that the training expanded their job opportunities and gave them the leverage to become employed. The perception that the youth in the community lacked interest in digital skills training and that the library could not change it, had been proved wrong. It was a case of poor sensitisation and awareness creation on the services available.
Chinwe was fulfilled and said, “ INELI-SSAf has taught me to discover possibilities for additional services that African public libraries could offer. More cohorts should be trained with AfLIA’s INELI-SSAf materials so that public library staff in Africa can become emboldened to render relevant information services to their communities. ” This is someone ready to share progressive information with her peers to assist them to also do better on their jobs.
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