Promote Deaf Literacy in Nigeria

Progress Report on the Documentation of Indigenous Nigerian Sign Language

This report presents to you the ongoing activities of Team S-DELI towards the first documentation of Indigenous Nigerian Sign Language using Tech innovation for Deaf literacy in Nigeria, which started being a reality after we graduated as GlobalGiving partners on the June 2018 Accelerator. We wish to first appreciate you all, for your great supports and donations to our project. This is a brief report because we are still at the planning stage of the first outreach which is scheduled to come in October 2018.

The planning for the first documentation outreach became real after our graduation from the June 2018 Accelerator fund raise. Outreach was scheduled to hold in Abuja and Kaduna for a period of two weeks. While the pre-documentation training will hold in Abuja, the signed language documentation exercise will take place in Kaduna. The pre-documentation will train team members and deaf individuals who will participate in the documentation project. Professors and experts in language documentation and signed language linguistics will be teaching at the program. Team members and other participants will travel from across Nigeria to attend this program, accommodation and feeding will be provided and participants will be issued a certificate of participation.

We have secured the venues for the training and the documentation exercise. Round trip International flight for the Project Leader from the United States to Nigeria has been secured plus other internal transportation. Tools and equipment for this initial documentation project have been procured, all with the funds in our hands. The deaf community to be documented in this first stage is eagerly waiting for us (as shown on the picture). As we hope to receive more funds in the subsequent fund raise opportunities, including the International Literacy Day Fund raise, we hope to take care of any needs that will arise in the course of this outreach.

In this documentation outreach, we hope to collect and annotate up to 3,500 indigenous Nigerian Sign Language lexical signs and up to 50 discourses from the deaf community in Kaduna, while the team will work for up to six hours a day. These signed language materials will later be edited and archived while we collect more sign materials from other deaf communities in the country. Details of the documentation activities will be shared with you as they come. For the meantime, we appreciate you for being part of our initial success story.

Thank you!

Links:

• https://www.s-deli.org/portfolio/project-the-documentation-of-nigerian-sign-language/