IBBY Announces the Winners of the
2010 IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award
The IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Award, initiated by the International Board on Books for Young People and sponsored by the Japanese newspaper company the Asahi Shimbun, is presented to projects run by groups or institutions that are judged to be making a lasting contribution to reading promotion for children and young people.
The Award is given every two years to two projects and presented to the winners at the biennial IBBY Congress. It was a difficult task for the current jury to choose two winners from the twelve nominations as all the projects were of great merit and complemented IBBY’s Mission Statement. Each nominated project targeted children who live in disadvantageous circumstances with no or little access to books. They were really Reading Promotion Projects!
The projects nominated for the 2010 IBBY-Asahi Award were:
- Alola Literacy & Reading Programme, Dili, Timor-Leste, proposed by IBBY Australia
- Indigenous Children´s Literature Writers´ Meeting, Brazil, proposed by IBBY Brazil
- Osu Children´s Library Fund, Ghana, proposed by IBBY Canada
- Visible Readings for Invisible Children, Medellín, Colombia, proposed by IBBY Colombia
- Room to Read, an international project, based in USA, proposed by IBBY Germany
- Kamishibai - To build a culture of peace in the world, Japan, proposed by IBBY japan
- Justita Arenas Reading Room, México City, México, proposed by IBBY Mexico
- Mama, Tata & … Myself Campaign, Nowa Iwiczna, Poland, proposed by IBBY Poland
- Roma People, invited to the library, Metlika, Slovenia, proposed by IBBY Slovenia
- Convenio de Cooperación al Plan de Lectura, Medellín, Colombia, proposed by IBBY Spain
- White Elephant / Domrei Sor, Phnom Penh, Cambodia, proposed by IBBY Sweden
- Akili Trust, Kenya, proposed by IBBY UK
After an intensive discussion the jury made its choice from these twelve projects and we are pleased to announce that the IBBY-Asahi Reading Promotion Awards for 2010 go to:
Osu Children´s Library Fund, Ghana
and
Taller de las Letras Jordi Sierra I Fabra Foundation, Medellín, Colombia
The Osu Children´s Library Fund (OCLF) is a Canada-based registered charity established 1991 to encourage reading and literacy among children and adults in Ghana, West Africa. To accomplish this, the OCLF raised funds to build, furnish and stock five large community libraries in impoverished areas of Ghana´s capital Accra, and a community library in Goi, a fishing village in the Greater Accra region. In addition, OCLF has helped to initiate and stock more than 150 smaller libraries in schools and villages in Ghana. The aim of the project is to instil in children, at the earliest possible age, the joy of reading and to enrich their self-esteem and broaden their horizons for the future. Not only children are taught reading and writing skills, but also adults and teens who have never had this opportunity. This will empower them to gain confidence and improve their job opportunities and thus their futures.
The Convenio de Cooperación al Plan de Lectura de Medellín, Colombia is a project that is an alliance between Medellín Town Hall and the Taller de las Letras Jordi Sierra I Fabra Foundation. It runs activities from the reading programme of the city in the four poorest and most vulnerable of the 16 municipalities of the city. In these areas – inhabited by over three million people, including a large number of displaced people as a result of political, economic and social violence – the level of poverty and violence is high: thousands of people do not have enough resources to live with dignity.
In the streets of the neighborhoods, in parks, on the sidewalks and other non-conventional areas, many activities such as workshops for promoting reading using traveling boxes, literary fairs, literature-related film events, chats and get-togethers with writers, all take place to bring reading closer to children and adults who lack the means to have access to books and culture in general. The project not only benefited more than 21.000 people, but has also generated the participation of many community organizations and cultural leaders from the communities involved, creating the foundations for future reading promotion and culture. The aim of the project is to contribute to a better quality of life in communities of Medellín through training workshops and the promotion of reading and literary events in order to educate sensitive, independent humans beings
IBBY warmly congratulates these two outstanding projects for their creative and effective approaches to helping children enter the world of books and reading.
The 2010 jury comprised
Jury President Hannelore Daubert (Germany), Anastasia Arkhipova (Russia), Nikki Gamble (Great Britain), Jehan Helou (Palestine), Ahmad Redza Khairuddin (Malaysia) and James Tumusiime (Uganda)
The prize money of US$ 10,000 for each winning project will be presented at the 32nd IBBY Congress in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, at a special festive occasion on Friday, 10 September 2010. IBBY will celebrate the 20th anniversary of this special award at the Congress with a festive evening with the winners and representatives of the Asahi Shimbun.
Bologna, 23 March 2010 / Hannelore Daubert, Ahmad Redza Khairuddin
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