Education Burkina Faso Project #7301

Provide a Rural African Village Library with Books

by Friends of African Village Libraries (FAVL)

Project Report | Jan 31, 2012
Continued Success in Belehede

By Krystle Austin | Peace Corps Volunteer

The Belehede Library

The village library of Béléhédé has been up and running for six months now! It has become an extremely important resource for the villagers, most of whom had never had access to reading materials before the building of the library. Thanks to generous donations through GlobalGiving and other sources, we were able to buy a large stock of books in French, Moré, Arabic and English for the library. The Béléhédé library currently has about 750 books.

The librarian was trained by a FAVL activities facilitator for two weeks, and has enthusiastically taken up his post. He runs weekly activities with villagers, including story times and game contests. Kids and adults alike frequent the library to check out books and to play games like Scrabble and Waré (a Burkinabè game). It has truly become a center of knowledge and culture in the village.

In September 2011, FAVL was able to hold its first reading camp in Béléhédé, helping 25 primary school students improve their reading skills through group and individual tutoring sessions, informational sessions with books about malaria and HIV/AIDS and artistic activities. Since the end of the camp, the library has continued to work with the same group of elementary school students on a weekly basis to maintain their literacy skills.

Now that the Béléhédé library has a sufficient stock of books, we're ending the project. But if you would like to still contribute to Béléhédé, we have a new project to fund reading camps in all of Burkina's libraries, including this village. Thank you so much to all of donors for your generous support of FAVL projects!

Dounko with Belehede Librarian During Training

Reading Camp 2011

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Jan 12, 2012
Update December 2011

By Krystle | Project Leader

Student Working on Syllabation

During the summer reading camps of 2011, it was a common observation of the animators that a large number of the students were not able to recite the alphabet or sound out syllables to make words. At every camp, the animators had to start at zero with between 5 and 10 4th-grade-aged students who did not know the letters in the French alphabet. And the instruction of the day for all of the kids usually concentrated on putting letters together and sounding out syllables. This is a major problem for a group of students who will soon be taking their exams that determine whether they can enter into middle school. If they cannot read their lessons or what the teacher writes on the board, how can we expect them to understand the lesson and succeed in school? Unfortunately, class sizes are so big, especially in small villages in Burkina Faso, that the teachers do not have the time to help the slower students keep up. After the camps, many of the animators remarked that the kids made amazing progress during the one week of the reading camp, and if they were able to work like that all throughout the year, grades would be much higher in the classes. The librarians and animators were all encouraged to set up meetings with kids to work on their reading skills as time allowed

The librarian at Béléhédé has taken the initiative to do just that and to alleviate the problem of illiteracy amongst students early on. Working off of the information he gathered during the reading camps, this librarian decided to set up a weekly date with the 60 kids of CE2 (3rd grade) at a local primary school. In the first week, he worked on reciting the alphabet. In a note about the session, he remarked that about 50% of the kids could not do this. During the second and third weeks, he helped them recognize the vowels and consonants in the alphabet and what sound each letter makes. For the last lesson of the month, they worked on recognizing the consonants and what sounds they make in different words. In his report, he says that he saw a marked improvement in the level of the kids and hopes to continue working with them in the month of November.

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Oct 10, 2011
Reading Camps in Belehede

By Krystle Austin | Volunteer

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