The end of September is the halfway mark of our 2017 financial year. Here’s a quick update of where we are in achieving our goals for the year.
Popularising Reading
We’re currently supporting 287 beneficiary groups around the country, 51 of which are new groups. We’ve delivered 11,656 books – close on halfway towards our 25,000 goal – and we’ve distributed 72,890 of our ‘Rights’ pocket booklets, over-reaching our annual goal of 65,000 already!
A major delivery of books starts in October/November so we’re well on our way to meeting our annual targets in terms of book deliveries. Nandipha Tshabane and our new beneficiary assistant, Alonzo Naude, are managing this process and ensuring that we receive feedback from our groups on how the books have been used and what impact they have had on reading habits.
20 of the 51 new groups form part of a special project with Vodacom Foundation, where we provide the materials to support reading groups in the Vodacom/Department of Basic Education centres around the country. We’re also providing them with additional support material for setting up reading groups and we’re hoping to be able to use this with our other reading groups nationwide.
In addition, we’ve continued our Reading for Enjoyment project with False Bay College’s Fish Hoek and Khayelitsha campuses. Almost 400 students on each of the campuses participated in the reading campaign. Sonja Kruse has spearheaded this project, ensuring that there are a range of exciting activities for the students.
Growing Communities of Readers
We’ve met (and exceeded) our content goals for the halfway mark by publishing 37 books, 32 short stories, 26 children’s stories, 2 resource books and 117 articles and blog posts on fundza.mobi. In addition, we’ve surpassed our unique reader goals – by reaching more than 320,000 readers in this time.
Part of the reason for the surpassing of our content goals was the donation of content (with the comments) from YOZA, an early mobile literacy project headed by current FunDza trustee, Steve Vosloo. We’re delighted that FunDza readers now have an opportunity to access this amazingly rich local content. Thanks, Steve!
At the end of September, Mxit finally closed its doors. This is very sad for us as it means that many of our early and faithful Mxit readers will no longer be able to easily connect with our content. While many Mxit readers had converted to other reading spaces, there were still a significant number of regular users who used FunDza’s Mxit portal because it was cheap to access and worked on a wide range of devices, including older feature phone models. We’re trying to convert many of these to our freebasics.com app – but less than a fifth of the devoted readers are on Cell C and so able to access our content this way.
We are in the process of redesigning our site to make it lighter for mobile phone users and to make it more user-friendly. We’re hoping that this will encourage more reading and for longer periods via our site, Android app and app on Freebasics.com.
Developing Young Writers
This programme is growing! And, it is heart-warming to see the incredible talent of young people showcased in our Fanz section on fundza.mobi. In the first six months of the year we published the work of 393 young people who submitted 57 stories, 95 essays, 294 poems and a play.
We’ve also exceeded the number of planned writing workshops by running 14 in the first six months (with an annual target of 18) that reached 364 learners.
We’d completed three writing mentorships with another 5 mentorships in progress. Here young highly talented writers are mentored by professional writers to produce short stories for fundza.mobi. Some of these are also included in print anthologies. Read the three that were published here: In my hands, by Anathi Nyadu; A request to a kill, by Asiphe Besethi; and Dark Cloud, by Nhlalwenhle Londeka Luthuli.
We’re trying to find ways of scaling our impact with this programme. One of the ways will be through providing a structured writing club programme for special beneficiary groups. We’ll be launching these early next year.
Deepening Reading Practice
We’ve been developing a number of online reading courses for a range of groups. As of the end of September we had more than 100 course modules, were supporting courses in 32 groups and had 930 students enrolled on a course.
We’re about to launch some open online reading courses so that our general fundza.mobi readers can participate too. These will be very short courses – with 10 modules or less – that are designed to help learners prepare for exams. Watch this space to find out how this works!
Into the future!
We’re growing as an organisation. We also celebrated our 5th birthday in April this year. In March we had grown to seven staff members and now we’re numbering 12. And, we’ve introduced new board members and said goodbye to older ones. As a result these past six months have been ripe for reflection about how we should grow, what are the real needs in the literacy space, and how can we try to meet these.
We have a range of new plans for years to come – including changes to how we manage our different beneficiary stakeholders, what we are able to (and not able to) offer (and preferably offer at scale). We’ll be revealing more in the next couple of months as we fine-tune the plans. So, stay tuned for further updates. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter and, if you have thoughts and ideas, please contact us!