By Siyolise Fikizolo
Many organisations in South Africa are racing to distribute more books to children but one Eastern Cape-based nonprofit says access to books alone will not bridge the early learning gap of the country. Mikhulu Trust says the solution lies in books without words.
Karen Ross, representing the Mikhulu Trust at the Children’s Literature Conference at the Amazwi South African Museum of Literature, made a compelling statement that the focus needs to shift from simply getting books into homes to ensuring those books actively support child development.
We have organisations doing a fantastic work in getting books out there, such as BookDash, Biblinef and others, however, we need books that do more than sit on shelves, we need books that build brains and strengthen families,” she said.
Mikhulu Trust, which was founded in 2017, crafts wordless picture books for children aged up to six years developed by researchers, academics and illustrators and distributed alongside training programmes that teach parents about the books effectively.
This approach started when Ross and her colleagues encounters a practical problem. They saw that wordless books were expensive and they were coming from Europe and America and so they were culturally irrelevant to South African families. “We decided to create our own,” Ross explained. “And because there is no text, one book works in any South African home, whether they speak isiXhosa, Afrikaans, Zulu or any of our eleven official languages.”
She supported her presentation with neuroscience about a child’s first thousand days when thousands of neural connections are forming every second in the brain. By age five 90% of brain growth is complete. “These years are make or break, the more neural networks we can help form during this window, the more resilient the child becomes and the better their outcomes for school, for jobs, for breaking cycles of poverty,” she told the conference audience.
According to their research, the key factor is what scientists call “serve and return” which is the interaction between baby and the caregiver. The back and forth of the baby smiling and the caregiver’s response builds a pathway that is neural, which forms the foundation for all future learning.
Wordless books, according to Ross, naturally encourage interaction in a way that books with text often do not. In 2018, Mikhulu Trust saw the effectiveness of the approach in a randomised, controlled trial conducted by the University of Cape Town professors in Khayelitsha. The study compared families who received training in dialogic book sharing with a control group.
After just eight weeks of sharing books for no more than 10 minutes a day, children in the intervention group showed significantly better receptive and expressive language skills. They could focus for longer periods and demonstrated improved social-emotional abilities, including showing concern for others.
However, the impact on parents was equally dramatic and caregivers who participated in the book-sharing program showed markedly increased sensitivity to their children’s cues and more positive, responsive interactions.
Ross is not calling for an end to book distribution programs, instead, she’s advocating for both-and approaches, widespread access coupled with intentional developmental design.
