2023 Declared ‘Year of Digital
The Ghana Library Authority has declared 2023 as a “Year of Digital Reading”, with a tagline - “Digital reading, a springboard to eradicate learning poverty”.
The authority declared 2019 as a “Year of Reading” to encourage the youth to develop the habit of reading; 2020 was the “Year of Learning” to connect the youth to knowledge resources through innovation, and 2021, the “Year of Literacy” to reduce learning poverty in the country while 2022 was declared the “Year of Books”.
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The Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of the authority, Hayford Siaw, was recounting activities under his stewardship since he took over as the CEO of the authority in 2017, in an interview with the Daily Graphic in Accra.
According to him, "this year, after making sure that we have some books on the shelves of our public libraries and digital libraries, we decided to declare this year a year of digital reading to encourage people to make use of technology devices at our disposal to access relevant learning resources”.
Increase in stock
“We managed to increase the book stock from 1,195,008 to 1,281,839 by the end of year 2022, an increase by some 86,831 books," the CEO said.
He added that the authority also worked with stakeholders to undertake some programmes to promote literacy in the country.
According to him, those interventions helped to increase patronage of public libraries across the country, adding that they managed to improve library visits from 1,137813, in 2021, to 1,423910 in 2022.
Mr Siaw further said in 2022, the authority with support of UNICEF embarked on a project in which youth engagement centres were created leading to the renovation of 10 libraries across the country.
Some of the centres are located in Accra Central, Tema, Secondi, Kumasi, Tamale, Bolgatanga and Wa.
As part of the initiative, the youth were also trained in entrepreneurship while others were provided with opportunities to learn through a massive open online platform.
“In all, a total of 14,000 youth benefited from the project, including 5,495 others who also benefited from our massive open online course platforms,” he added.
Mr Siaw further said that there was an increase in mobile library van visits to schools from 1,126 in 2021, to 1,148 schools in 2022.
