Abuja – The high rate of mass illiteracy in the country must be curbed to promote good reading culture and development, a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) has said.
Mr Adang Daniel, Chief Custodian, Entrepreneurship Hotline Associates (EHA), expressed the view in an interview with the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) in Abuja on Thursday.
Daniel said that for people to have the ability to read, they must be literate but noted that a large population of Nigerians were illiterate.
“Nigeria is one of the countries that have high illiteracy rate, to promote reading; mass literacy must also be promoted.
“Everybody should be able to read a book to expand their knowledge particularly books that are outside your profession,’’ Daniel said.
He told NAN that in its effort to eradicate mass illiteracy, the organisation has established a programme tagged, “Project I Read.’’[pro_ad_display_adzone id=”10″]
According to him, there are various programmes under the project, such as the Nigeria National Reading Championship, No One Left Behind and Book Exchange Clubs (BEX) to enable them to achieve their goals.
He said the first edition of the Nigeria National Reading Championship would begin in June 2015 for children in primary and secondary schools in all the states of the federation.
Daniel said the project entailed reading competition among private and public schools.
He said lists of books would be announced monthly to participating schools.
Daniel said that after the announcement the children would read one of the books giving priority to Nigerian authors within a period of one week and send a summary of the book to their principals.
He said the best summary would be selected from all schools and sent to the judges for scoring.
He added that the winner of the competition would become an ambassador of promoting mass literacy in the country and a library would be built in the community of the winner.
He explained that the project was self-funding as interested participants at the primary and secondary level would pay a token of N1,000 and N2,000 respectively. (NAN)