Next in our series, Rooted in Resilience: From Crisis to Opportunity, is the story of a little boy and his grandfather in Tajikistan. For more photos and stories of the Aga Khan Foundation’s partners, please download our 2013 annual report.

Four-year-old Orzu (pictured above with his grandfather) struggles with delayed speech development. He lives with his grandfather while his parents seek work in Russia. Jobs are scarce in their rural district of Tajikistan’s Khatlon region.

Few children here, including Orzu, have access to preschool, a crucial gap in education left after the Soviet Union’s collapse. Orzu had nothing to read in the Tajik language he speaks at home. Furthermore, few parents have the habit of reading with their children or telling them stories.

Seeing Orzu’s struggles, his grandfather Nazarov resolved to help his grandson with reading. Recently they were introduced to the mini-library in the village school. The mini-library is part of the Reading for Children (RfC) program, created by the Aga Khan Foundation in Gorno-Badakhshan and expanded to Khatlon with funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

“I cannot find words to express my gratitude to the organizers of this mini-library,” says Nazarov. “My grandson had pronunciation problems and was always too shy to speak. Since the mini-library opened, we get a variety of high-quality books with pictures and read them together.”

Reading for Children nurtures families and storytelling in a way that improves children’s reading and school performance. In Tajikistan it has inspired families in two provinces to read together more. Research shows that children who read with their families and had early childhood education enjoy an advantage later in life.

Orzu and his grandfather often visit the mini-library to pick up books and take them home to read together. Since they started, Orzu is speaking more and more and his confidence has grown. He loves paging through each book, describing its pictures and asking questions. Then he asks his grandfather to read the story.

“I am very happy that my grandson’s pronunciation is getting better,” says Nazarov. “I hope that he continues to enjoy reading in the future.” With more exposure to books, reading will help Orzu adapt to school more quickly.

Reading for Children helps over 26,000 children across two provinces. The two-year project is creating 246 mini-libraries and distributing 100 “libraries in a bag” to community-based savings groups and women’s groups. It is developing 30 new storybooks for young readers in Tajikistan. A recent study found that three out of four families in the program said they used their school libraries, a far higher proportion than for families not in the program.

Less than two decades after famine and a devastating civil war, Tajikistan has come a long way toward self-reliance. Aga Khan Foundation is proud to have been there all along, supporting that shift from external dependence to local initiative (see an article on that shift in InterAction’s magazine). The Reading for Children program shows another step: how early childhood education can foster love of reading and a brighter future among the resilient Tajik people.

For more about the Reading for Children program, download the 2013 AKF USA annual report.

Check out the full Rooted in Resilience: From Crisis to Opportunity series here, and be sure to join us on Facebook!