E-library to offer students access to education resources

TANZANIA: STUDENTS have every reason to smile following the roll out of the e-Library project which aims to revolutionise education by providing access to quality education resources countrywide.

Coordinated by the Tanzania Institute for Education (TIE) in strong collaboration with Snapplify, a South African based company specialising in educational technology, the project envisions reaching out to about 11 million students and almost 200,000 teachers across the country.

Students and teachers will have access to thousands of free e-books and curriculum-aligned content in several languages including Kiswahili.

The e-Library will also offer a diverse array of huge corrections of educational resources including supplementary text books, study guides, extra study materials and leisure reading.

Government Partnership Manager at Snapplify Mr Stephen Bestbier revealed this during an interview with the media recently, indicating that e-Library projects will give students access to thousands of  educational resources.

“The e-Library project will provide 24/7 access to both online and offline educational and leisure contents to students,” said Mr Bestbier, noting that the goal is to promote diversity and inclusivity while embracing indigenous and local literature, hence instill cultural pride among Tanzanian’s students.

He revealed that the actual roll out of the project will be completed in three years, noting that the e-Library project is one among the largest digital education projects within the African continent and beyond.

Thus, within the three years the Snapplify and TIE intend to roll out the e-Library project in over 19,000 government schools, providing students with digital identity which will give them access to the educational resources at any time.

According to him, the idea evolves around creating a digital environment by trying to lay the foundation for further innovation and access to digital resources across.

In contrast to the conventional libraries students will have access to the e-Library even in the most remote areas with no such facilities provided they get a hands-on digital device.

Besides, TIE will be making their own authorised prescribed content available to teachers and students in the e-Library. This will include students in the remotest areas who will also get access to the authorised prescribed content.

He identified among other critical advantages of the project is simplifying and lowering the cost of having access to quality educational content.

The Manager also pointed out that last year Snapplify received the UNESCO King Sejong Literacy Prize 2023 for their contribution to specifically nurturing mother tongue languages through providing access to local language content in the e-Library. Such was really critical for fostering the cultural pride and identity among Tanzanian students.

“Research has shown many times that early childhood education in mother tongue is essential to development of identity and nurturing of literacy for the long-term.

“We need to be able to provide local language content to our children. The ability to lower barriers to distributing and lowering the cost of distribution of content in even remote areas is critical to providing a channel for local Tanzanian publishers and authors to be able to distribute their content to the market,” he noted.

Thus, Snapplify works very closely with publishers, authors, NGOs to be able to distribute local content and promote local voices, citing it as very important.

He invited investors and partners in the East African region to collaborate in implementing the project not only in expanding the e-Library project but also to prioritise leisure reading promotion.

“We extend the invitation beyond Tanzania as we are really looking to utilise and leverage the technology to uplift education in the African continent.

“We need to provide all the resources we can to ensure that students and teachers achieve the levels they need to reach,” he stated.

He added: “Reading is a cultural thing. What we are really looking to do is to change culture by providing the right resources…like building a habit of making the resources available. There are many ingredients to creating a reading culture visibility, prioritising the education system from early often there is a focus of secondary schooling literacy.