The Worldreader’s Local Content for African Libraries (LOCAL) in partnership with African Library and Information Association (AFLIA) and Ghana Library Authority (GhLA) have introduced a reading tablet to revamp reading in libraries.

The tablet, which is also known as the “e-reader,” has increased the patronage of library activities by 83 per cent, 69 per cent and 74 per cent in the Ashanti, Central and Volta regions respectively.

Mr Prince Osei Gyamfi, a facilitator, in a presentation on the impact of the e-reader at the closing ceremony of the project in Accra, said the number of children visiting the libraries increased two-fold during the project period.

Mr Gyamfi said because of the increase, demand of the library services by patrons, supervision became a challenge, children were only interested in reading on the tablets, but were not willing to register as members of the library clubs.

He said in the Central Region alone, 24,169 patrons were reached with 6,635 from Cape Coast, 2,584 from Swedru and 14,950 from Abura Dunkwa and in all, 47 outreach and in-house activities were carried out.

Mr James Ofosu Frimpong, a facilitator from the Ashanti Region, said the numbers that visited the libraries because of the e-readers was encouraging that the tablets could not serve them at a time so librarians devised ways to get everyone to have access to the e-readers.

He said the librarians made pupils sit in pairs in order to read or ask them to read the same story aloud.

There were 56 outreach and 42 in-house activities in the region during the period.

He said most of the outreach was done in Kumasi and since the city’s library could not host huge number of pupils, the readings were done in schools.

Mr Ofosu Frimpong said one of their outreaches in the Amansie West District was impactful because it helped to reduce absenteeism.

The Project, which involved nine community libraries in three regions trained 24 librarians, distributed 450 devices to the libraries and targeted children from age zero to twelve, deploying 90,000 books which 9000 were in the local languages.