The Guardian and Observer Christmas appeal 2013: Worldreader

Diasporian News of Monday, 23 December 2013

Source: The Guardian

Seven-year-old Enoch wants to be a good student, but circumstances have not been on his side. At his home in Suhum, a ramshackle town in the dewy hills of Ghana's green and mountainous eastern region, straggly wires protrude from the empty shell where electrical sockets should be. The landlord decided halfway through building their two-bedroom home that he did not want to pay to complete the wiring and so Enoch, his parents and his elder sister have no lights at home.

Enoch sleeps on a grubby mattress on the floor by the front door. He has no desk, so he does his homework sitting on a faded armchair, crammed in beside his mother's basket of bread, hot chocolate sachets and oats items she prepares and sells by the roadside.

"It would be better if we had lights at home," says Enoch, who wears worn plimsoll hi-tops, his yellow school shirt emblazoned with his primary school's logo, which bears the words: "Knowledge is power." It's a motto Enoch's parents understand, even though neither of them can read or write and they don't own a single book.

Enoch, however, has 140 books, which he can read even in the dark on a Kindle e-reader he was given at school. Described by his teachers as particularly bright, Enoch likes the Ghanaian stories in the local Tiwi language as well as in English but his favourite book is the dictionary. He scrolls expertly through the neatly cased Kindle, searching for the alphabet to read aloud. Around him other children in stream C at Suhum primary, one of three government schools in the same, gently sloping compound, are sitting in the shade during their morning break, eating bread and oranges and playing ampe, a traditional Ghanaian game of clapping and jumping.

"I like reading this because it teaches me new words and numbers," Enoch says. "I want to be a pilot when I grow up and fly planes."

Suhum primary school is a beneficiary of a project run by the charity Worldreader, whose iRead 2 programme is distributing Kindles to children in nine African countries. The parents make huge sacrifices to send their children to school but, if it wasn't for the project, they would still struggle to master literacy. More than 12,000 students and their families have so far benefited from the more than 2,000 titles available on the Kindles, in English and local languages.

The need for outside intervention at Suhum is clear. Despite being a model school, with good attendance rates and disciplined children and staff, the school has been beset by a lack of funding and chronic shortages of essential materials. "The government has not been providing us with enough books; it is a very serious problem," said Patrick Kyere-Koranteng, 30, an English teacher at the school. "The children are many, and sharing the few books we have was difficult. That affected their academic performance. And without textbooks it is very difficult to do a good job as a teacher."

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The Guardian and Observer Christmas appeal 2013: Worldreader