Three years ago, Abigail Babatunde struggled to read her schoolwork and frequently required the assistance of her teachers to correctly enunciate difficult words.
The working-class Lagos suburb of Ejigbo’s 11-year-old public school student, who is currently in primary six, reads them alone at home. She now reads books about friendship and adventure on a regular basis as well.
Eniola Akanbi, her class teacher, claims that Babatunde, who wants to be a doctor, is also more active in class. “Now, she [Babatunde] would jump up whenever I asked for a volunteer to come up to read to the classroom,” she said.
“Reading improves my mood,” Babatunde, who wants to be a medical doctor, said. [And] when a teacher asks a question in class, I’m able to respond because I’ve read the day before. While I’m walking along the street, I occasionally read the signboard.”
The narrative underwent a transformation following the introduction of a new classroom library in January 2022.
The classroom library takes the form of a bookshelf crafted from repurposed fabric that hangs from a nail on the classroom wall. Resembling a hanging shoe rack but slightly larger, it features between seven to 10 compartments. Each compartment houses a collection of three to five books of varying dimensions. These books are meticulously organized in a vertical arrangement, with their placement determined by size, descending from largest to smallest.
The inception of these bookshelves is credited to The Hanging Library, an initiative established by The Neo-Child Initiative. This volunteer group is dedicated to providing mentorship, literacy support, free medical services, and medication to children residing in low-income neighborhoods. With an impressive roster of nearly 300 committed volunteers, the initiative is chiefly financed through a book donation campaign and contributions from family, friends, and volunteers.
Currently, there are a total of 50 libraries and over 5,000 books spanning academic textbooks to engaging stories. These libraries are distributed across Abuja, the federal capital, as well as various cities within six states.
The initiative is funded mainly through a book drive and contributions from family, friends, and volunteers. There are now 50 libraries and more than 5,000 books from academic textbooks to story books, across Abuja, the federal capital, and cities in six states.
Closing the gap
According to a UNESCO 2022 assessment, there are more than 20 million youngsters in the nation who are not in school. However, due to inadequate funding for public schools and limited access to basic resources for students who are still in school, Nigeria’s basic education has suffered.
An estimated two-thirds of Nigerians are literate at a basic level since education is free at that level. But this January, Cristian Munduate, UNICEF’s Nigeria representative claimed that “75 per cent of children aged seven-to-14 years cannot read a simple sentence or solve a basic math problem”.
Seyi Bolaji, founder of Kaduna-based Project Educate A Child (ProjectEAC) campaign, thinks these numbers are a conservative estimate.
“The 20 million are those that are counted, what about those that are not counted … because people are still giving birth and they do not care whether these children go to school or not,” said Bolaji.
“Also too much energy is being given to out-of-school children while the ones in school are planning to leave school because the standard of education is declining,” she added. “When those in school are still unable to read and write, what is the point?”
The void that The Hanging Library, initially established in 2017 in Lagos, aims to bridge.
During his obligatory one-year national service in Lagos, Yusuf Shittu, the founder of TNCI, would routinely commute past Babatunde’s school on his way to work. On a particular day, he observed the absence of a physical library or an organized space for book storage within the expansive school complex, spanning seven buildings.
Having been nurtured with a fondness for reading newspapers from an early age by his father, Yusuf Shittu was motivated to pass on his passion for books. He expressed to Al Jazeera that this initiative provides an opportunity to positively shape an entire generation.
This perspective has garnered support from experts in the field.
“It’s an innovative solution to a deep problem in our society,” said Kemi Ogunsanya, a project manager at Lagos-based online hub TeacherX Project. “A lot of factors and lack of reading materials is one of the causes of the declining rate of reading culture. A lot of schools don’t have libraries and are only left with just bare classrooms.”
More than half of Nigeria’s estimated 200 million people live on less than $2 daily, according to the National Bureau of Statistics. For many of them, their meagre wages can barely afford enough food, much less books for their children.
“You can’t give what you don’t have,” said Bolaji. “There are some families who have not eaten for days, telling them to invest in buying textbooks for their children will make one look stupid.”
The hanging libraries can help children from low-income households at schools improve their grades and have a broadened worldview, said Ogunsanya.
“A reader is a leader,” she said. “A reader will always have an expanded mindset, and all of this will often affect academic progression.
A life-changer
But more needs to be done with initiatives like this, experts said, to target not just children in the classroom but also out-of-school children. “The school is only a building, a child can learn anywhere,” Bolaji said. “We can get this mobile library to them [street kids] and teach them how to read and write.”
According to Shittu, there are plans to expand it to additional communities in other states and develop a plan to replace ripped and missing books but there are financial and logistical challenges to resolve in order to make that happen.
For Babatunde, who lives with her father and lone caregiver, a butcher by day and security guard by night, the library has been a life-changer. By day, she chooses any book available at the library to aid her in her assignment because she is not allowed to take books out of the school.
Often, her book of choice is Without a Silver Spoon, by Eddie Iroh, the story of a boy born into poverty, who is wrongly accused of theft in the household where he works as a domestic help to pay his school fees.
During the daily 15-minute free periods for her class, Babatunde rushes to the hanging library beside the chalkboard, almost breaking into a run to get it, before anyone else does. And on her way back to her seat, she is already flipping through the pages, reading.