Bridge to
Reading
By James Kigamwa,
International Director, Bridge to Reading
In many African cultures, children learn
to read for the first time in a classroom,
while in many Western societies, initial
reading is predicated upon daily bedtime
reading of stories by their parents. I remember
learning to read for the first time
when I was about eight years old. My then
primary school teacher asked us to listen
carefully to the sounds of the five Swahili
language vowels a – e – i – o – u, which
she had written out on the chalkboard.
After asking us to repeat, she would add
syllables in their ‘families’ e.g. ma – me –
mi – mo – mu. In combining different syllables
and vowels to make words we were
familiar with, it became apparent that my
classmates and I could easily read words
that we understood and sentences that
were being generated. The challenge of
sustaining our quick gains in reading and
scaling up to difficult texts was that we
couldn’t find many storybooks that were
written in the local language, so we had
to transition quickly into learning to read
in English, which had more books and
therefore more stories. That’s more than
four decades ago, and the rest is history
as I learned to read and write, a skill that
has taken me farther than I could have
imagined.
According to UNESCO, there are more
than 700 million illiterate adults around the
world today. These non-readers are found
in homes, churches, and market places,
especially in rural communities across the
globe, and women make up the majority.
Bridge to Reading works with One Mission
Society’s Village Church Planting program
across Africa to provide training for tutors
and trainers. We also provide teaching and
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