Three years ago, Bibiani Methodist Basic’s reading club met in a converted storeroom with a dozen donated books and eight regular pupils. This year, one of those eight — Abena, now twelve — won the national Reading Icon prize outright.
Her teacher, who has run the club since it started, says the turning point wasn’t a new resource or a new method. It was consistency: the same two afternoons a week, every week, for three years, with no cohort gap and no funding lapse.
Abena’s win puts Bibiani on the map for a programme that has, until now, been dominated by schools in Accra and Kumasi. Regional coordinators say they’re already seeing more small-town schools ask how to set up a club of their own.
We’ll be sharing more profiles like this one throughout the year — not because the story is unusual, but because we want it to stop being unusual.