NGO to launch ‘One District, One Library Campaign’

Youth Empowerment for Life (YEfL) is to roll out a ‘One District, One Library Campaign’ to complement government’s efforts towards ensuring quality learning outcomes especially at the basic education level in the Northern Region.

The YEfL’s ‘One District, One Library Campaign’ seeks to advocate the establishment of functional libraries in districts in the region where such facility does not exist as well as reactivate the existing ones that are not functional.

The move formed part of efforts to address poor reading attitude amongst pupils and students in the region to improve academic performance at both basic and secondary school levels.

This was contained in a statement issued by YEfL signed by its Acting Director, Mr Abdul Ganiyu Alhassan and copied to the Ghana News Agency in Tamale.

The statement said the poor performance of pupils, which placed the Northern, Upper East and Upper West Regions at the bottom of the national Basic Education Certificate Examinations (BECE) league table for the past 10 years, was worrying adding that the situation was a serious development that must engage the attention of all in the region.

It noted that efforts by some teachers and NGOs to encourage pupils and students to cultivate the habit of reading were going down the drain because of the absence of reading materials emphasising the need for a community with a Junior High School to have a functional library to augment the efforts of teachers as well as improve reading amongst pupils.

The statement said “Youth Empowerment for Life is concerned because the structure of the country’s education system makes basic education level a crucial point in the academic life of pupils, who are either within the youth brackets or will soon become part of the teeming youth and therefore there was the need to ensure that they are supported to successfully leap over that academic………”

It said YEfL and its partner youth groups had been brainstorming over the issue to find effective ways of collaborating with other stakeholders to improve on the performance of BECE candidates in the region.

It said YEfL would collaborate with its partners including Oxfam IBIS, youth groups, Ministry of Education and Ghana Education Service, Ghana Book Trust, African Library Project and Metropolitan, Municipal and District Assemblies to employ multiple strategies to achieve the goal of the campaign.

He emphasized that YEfL would continue to mobilise and create suitable platforms for the youth in the region to demand responsiveness in the areas of education, agriculture and health from duty bearers while taking up their responsibilities as citizens.