Brilliant
Idea - Books @ “Regular Meeting-Places”
Ivory Coast's
women know how to have a ‘novel' time at salons
As many African women spend
much of their spare time in hair salons, Ivory Coast's chief librarian, also a
woman, came up with a brainwave scheme to help them read and learn to read.
Crammed
on shelves between hair extensions, untangling creams and straightening
lotions, a total 23 hair salons now offer customers a range of books on loan
from the National Library.
“Libraries
are practically non-existent in our suburbs and the ones that do exist get very
few visitors, and rarely women,” said chief librarian Chantal Adjiman, who
launched the project in 2012.
With
little time on their hands between work and childcare, most women simply do not
have the opportunity to seek out books.
So
the library decided it was best to take books to one of their “regular
meeting-places”.
“Ivorian
women are charmers,” said Adjiman. “They can spend more than an hour and a half
in a hair salon.” At the National Library building, where 1,750 books have been
set aside for the hair salons, staff pack novels, children's books and also
essays about women's or children's rights into boxes.
-
‘I come here just to read' - Outside one of the hair salons, located in a
market, a young woman sits reading on a bench oblivious to the noise or the
banter of the traders nearby.
“I've
got no money to buy books so I often come here just to read,” she said.
Inside
the salon, where a woman under a hood hair dryer thumbs a novel, owner
Benedicte Ouguehi says the presence of the books has attracted new customers.
Even
hairdressers working out in the open come by the salon to borrow books for
their clients, she adds.
In
Abidjan's well-heeled district of Cocody, 66-year-old salon owner Justine
Inagohi says she immediately agreed to sign onto the scheme.
“Women
gossip under the dryers, I'd rather they did something more educational,” she
said.
Inagohi
has even set up a reading corner for children, used both by children
accompanying their mothers and those who live in her own building.
The presence of the books, whether they be for children or for adults, gives
women who cannot read and write the incentive to learn, and even men are
beginning to turn up in women's hair salons to borrow them, said librarian
Adjiman.
“Ivorians
love reading but have no access to books,” she said. -AFP
Source | Daily News Analysis | 5 January 2017
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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