UNESCO and partners publish 130 open source children’s books in Uzbek

In the framework of the Translate a Story campaign, UNESCO, in cooperation with the Ministry of Public Education of Uzbekistan and the Norwegian agency for development (Norad), translated 130 children books into Uzbek. The books are openly available to use by schools and families in Uzbekistan. To celebrate the first success of this campaign, an online launch event will be organized next week with representatives from the Ministry, Norad, and UNESCO to introduce this new collection of Uzbek reading materials to teachers and learners in Uzbekistan.

One of the first countries to join this new phase of the Translate a Story campaign, Uzbekistan has now completed the translation of over one hundred children books into Uzbek, which will be made available online and openly accessible in the coming days on the Global Digital Library (GDL). The books have been reviewed and approved by the Ministry of Public Education of Uzbekistan to be used in schools and as part of the curriculum for early childhood education.

Translate a Story is a book translation campaign for early age reading launched in partnership with Norad, GDL, the Global Book Alliance (GBA), the UN agency for Refugees (UNHCR) and other partners. UNESCO is working with Ministries of Education to make more reading material available for children in the language they use at home. The need for reading material accessible at home is made even more important during the current global pandemic, causing school closure and disruption of education.

In this context, UNESCO reached out to the Ministries of Education of several countries offering them the opportunity to translate openly available children books from English into other languages, especially languages in which reading materials for children are scarce.