Bring innovative libraries to 100,000 Africans

UNLETTERED MIDDLE-AGED WOMEN LEARN NEW SKILLS

Nwando is a librarian in a branch of the National Library of Nigeria in Enugu. A number of the women in the city and its surrounding towns work in the informal sector as petty traders, artisans, and non-professional service providers, such as market sweepers and itinerant hawkers of food items and as subsistence farmers in the surrounding villages. Many of these women are middle-aged, mostly with no formal education. The challenge was how these women could gain literacy and entrepreneurship skills that would assist them to thrive in their businesses, including how to write their names so that they can open bank accounts or be able to read /recognise their names and track their savings with those they save their monies with, or be able to rightly count and know their monies when they are selling or buying items for resell. They also need to know how to price their farm products appropriately so that they will not be cheated. Could the library ever have programs for these categories of women? This question agitated Nwando’s mind as a female librarian.

Nwando was elated when she was chosen for the INELI- SSAf course to enable her to learn new things but she never connected the course to her agitated mind until the training started. Going through modules such as Time Management, Taking Risks, Making Decisions with Data, and Community Engagement, among others were very enlightening and educative. One of the assignments for Community engagement required her to meet, engage and know people in her community who are yet to use the library, find out their information needs, their challenges and if any barriers hinder them from using the library and then think about innovative library and information services for such community members. That was her breakthrough.

While carrying out the assignment on community engagement, she met with community leaders who assisted in mobilising the women she interviewed.  In the process, she learnt about their information needs and confirmed that they could be met by the library. The challenge was how to get the women to visit the library to be taught the skills. She selected volunteers from among the women who assisted in reaching out to their colleagues and identifying what they needed to learn and what the library could do for them. It became clear that it was not necessary to introduce them to books in the library as most of them could not read well. Rather, the library could simplify the knowledge in the available information resources for them. A skills acquisition outreach program that would be taken to the women where they are, was put in place. Skills that Nwando learnt at INELI SSAF such as Collaboration, Advocacy, Project Planning and Implementation were applied in making the outreach happen.

Volunteers were assembled. About One hundred and thirty (130) women were taught how to make and market household consumables such as soaps and detergents and also basic literacy and numeracy skills in their dialect. At the end of the first attempt, the women gained numeracy and literacy skills as they learned how to spell their names and understood basic counting, multiplication, subtraction and division. They also gained skills that would enable them to price their agricultural products adequately. Those who were interested in making soaps and detergents began producing them.
Nwando confessed when she saw the success of the outreach program “Personally, the success of the outreach taught me some practical lessons. It made me happy that I could put into practice what I had gained from the INELI SSAf Course. I understood that libraries are not only about books but should be institutions that transform lives and communities. I also learned that through community engagement, libraries can better understand what their communities need and create services geared to serve them rather than assuming that everyone is interested in accessing books on their shelves” Truly this is what libraries of today are supposed to do for their communities.

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