Prepared by Ethiopia Reads(ER), the third annual children’s reading summit was held on September 22-23, 2022 for two days with the theme of ‘Early childhood Development in Reading” at Addis Ababa Sapphire Addis hotel.
Aimed to inform, discuss and reflect on challenges and opportunities on children reading culture, the summit brought together more than 150 education stakeholders from Ethiopia and beyond.
Ethiopia Reads children summit started in 2019 and due to the pandemic and conflict in the country it was interrupted for one year and resumed this year for its third summit collaborating with the Ministry of Education.
Founded in 1998, Ethiopia Reads has been working in building youth and children’s literacy across Ethiopia. Its first library was established in 2003, and since that time ER has built more than 72 libraries spanning every region of the country, shipping more than a quarter million books and serving over 130,000 children per year.
The ER programs are managed by Ethiopians who live and work in Addis Ababa and the regional capital of Hawassa.
In Ethiopia, one of the biggest obstacles to literacy development is lack of reading materials for children in native languages. ER has stepped in with an effort to develop story books for children in several major Ethiopian languages. The organization has also begun collecting a bibliography of children’s literature in Ethiopia, both historical and current.
