The Safaricom Foundation has partnered with Storymoja Publishers to mark the ‘Day of the African Child’ with a reading challenge.
A statement on the partnership released on Wednesday said that over 200,000 students took part in the reading challenge from across the country.
The students read text from the fictional book ‘Attack of the Shidas’ a book that teaches ethnic tolerance to children.
The Day of the African Child is marked on June 16 each year. This year's theme is; 30 years after the adoption of the Charter: accelerate the implementation of Agenda 2040 for an Africa fit for children.
In the partnership, Safaricom Foundation will support the initiative through its literacy and numeracy programme which has provided a steady improvement in reading skills in the three counties it has been implemented.
"The programme is implemented in Bungoma, Turkana and Tana River counties aims to support learners lagging to acquire foundational literacy and numeracy skills within a short period of time. Each County has 40 schools participating in the programme," the statement said.
Over 4,500 learners in grade 3 to 5 have benefitted from the Accelerated Learning Programme, which is also implemented in partnership with Zizi Afrique Foundation through literacy and numeracy camps.
In June 2015, the Storymoja Read Aloud team led 229,043 children in 1,097 schools across 44 counties to set a national record and unofficially overtake the world record of most people reading the same text at the same time in multiple locations.
The current Guinness World Record for most people reading aloud from the same text at the same time in different venues is 223,363 participants in 909 venues across the United States of America.
In 1991, the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the then OAU instituted the DAC in memory of the 16th June 1976 student uprising in Soweto, South Africa.
The students marched to protest against the poor quality of education they received and demanded to be taught in their languages.
