In response to this global educational challenge, our team based at the University of British Columbia developed the open multilingual literacy portal Global Storybooks.
This portal hosts custom sites with multilingual open-licensed books for over 40 countries and regions on five continents. Our vision is to help democratise global flows of information and resources, to facilitate language learning – including Indigenous languages – and to promote literacy.
We believe the Global Storybooks project has the potential to promote quality education, literacy and multilingualism worldwide. Open educational resources (OER) have much potential to address the lack of reading materials in poorly resourced communities, facilitate language learning and reduce inequities between communities and nations.
From 150+ African languages
The origins of this Global Storybooks digital project are found in the African Storybook initiative, which digitises and makes freely available under an open license over 1,000 original stories in over 150 African languages, as well as English, French and Portuguese.
The South African organisation Saide began developing this site in 2013, with funding from the UK charity Comic Relief and research support from UBC scholars.
Grounded in a shared vision of global literacy and open technology, our UBC team collaborated on the development of Storybooks Canada, with seed funding from UBC Language Sciences. Launched in 2018, Storybooks Canada was the first of our Global Storybooks sites. It has a growing team, with a range of funders, including Education without Borders, the Peter Wall Institute and Mitacs. It is built on a curated selection of 40 openly licensed stories from the African Storybook that have been repurposed for a Canadian and global audience.
The stories have been translated into 19 of the most widely spoken languages in Canada, with studio-quality audio versions. An additional 10 languages are still in the process of being translated or recorded. Many of the translations and recordings, which are ongoing, are done by international graduate student volunteers with an interest in literacy and language learning.