The learning crisis brought about by the pandemic forced education stakeholders to think about digital approaches of ensuring the continuity of studies. Zoom and Google Classrooms quickly became the norm, and teachers began searching for other online learning tools to use. Podcasts that were formulated for different levels of school goers rose in popularity, with one such being the African Children’s Stories Podcast.
African Children’s Stories Podcast is the creation of EduTab Africa, an organization working to implement a number of projects that promote innovative ways of learning. The podcast is a platform that teaches values using folktales from different communities as well as stories about Kenyan heroes. According to Patrick Njoroge, the co-founder of EduTab Africa, the inspiration for starting the podcast was to build strong early literacy and oral language skills among learners.
“African Children’s Stories Podcast is a site for children, teachers, and parents that aims to promote a reading culture. It was inspired by the need to pass down African history through storytelling. After all, oral storytelling has always been part and parcel of our tradition,” he says.
A lot of time and work went into curating this podcast. Even before embarking on this project, EduTab Africa first had to source for open license stories that they could create audio versions from. This obstacle was overcome by forging a partnership with African Storybook Project (ASP), a South African initiative that promotes literacy using openly licensed digital storybooks. The ASP story bank has hundreds of works in over 222 African languages. EduTab is repurposing these stories into English and Swahili for the Kenyan audience.
The first episode was released on 22nd July 2020, after months of working on the story sourcing, scripting, and brand design of the podcast. Since then, one season consisting of eight Swahili and ten English episodes has been produced.
Oftentimes, parents, teachers, and education based organizations reach out to EduTab to share on the positive impact that the stories have had on learners. For Patrick, this validates and affirms the importance of the work they do. This resource has come in extremely handy during the pandemic, and will hopefully continue to support learning in the post-COVID era.
What’s next for African Children’s Stories Podcast? The team continues to work on creating audio stories and hopes to incorporate more African languages on the podcast.
Do you have kids who would love to listen to some folktales? Tune into this podcast here.