Publications

2023 National Reading Survey - Key findings: 

1. Access to reading materials 
2. Reading with children
3. Digital reading
4. Languages
5. Libraries 
6. Motivation and reader identity

This brief is written for those actors who plan, fund, produce and distribute reading materials in the South African reading ecosystem. This includes actors in government, publishers, authors and self-publishers, literacy NGOs, and donors (foundations, corporate, etc.) who support reading material production and distribution.

The brief extracts insights and recommendations from the larger National Reading Barometer project. The National Reading Barometer project seeks to spark debate and enable collective decision-making around shared priorities and collaborative action in support of literacy and reading.

This special issue brief summarises the 2023 National Reading Survey and National Reading Barometer findings related to reading and children. This includes adults reading with young children (10 and under) and older children (11-18) reading for themselves.

It is written for institutions implementing programmes in early childhood development, primary and secondary education, and generally working with children and caregivers to improve children’s lives and opportunities. This includes government institutions, civil society organisations in the literacy and reading sector and corporate funders of literacy and education activities.

This special issue brief summarises the 2023 National Reading Survey and National Reading Barometer findings related to libraries.

Public libraries are crucial institutions for the support of reading cultures across the world. This is especially true for countries like South Africa, where high levels of inequality and poverty, coupled with a commercialised reading materials industry (selling locally published and imported materials/ books/ magazines/ etc), makes owning books and other reading materials unaffordable for the majority of the population.

The National Reading Barometer project describes adult reading culture and the broader reading ecosystem in South Africa. The project includes two components: the National Reading Survey (NRS), a nationally representative survey of the adult population aged 16+, and the National Reading Barometer (NRB), a new compilation of secondary datasets that assesses the overall health of the South African reading ecosystem. The summary report shares high-level findings from the project and recommendations for further research.

This report presents the results of the South African National Reading Survey, conducted in 2023. The National Reading Survey is a nationally representative survey of the adult population aged 16+ which describes the reading practices, preferences and contexts of adults, both in terms of reading for themselves and reading with children in their household. In addition to covering information about frequency, depth and types of reading, access to and preferences regarding reading materials, and attitudes/motivations related to reading, the survey has focus areas relating to library use, digital reading, reading with children and reading language preferences.
 

The animated video summarises the results of the South African National Reading Survey 2023

This presentation was shared at the National Reading Barometer project launch event on 13 June 2023

This report describes the methodology of the 2023 South African National Reading Survey, a nationally representative survey of the adult population aged 16+ which describes the reading practices, preferences and contexts of adults, both in terms of reading for themselves and reading with children in their household. The technical report provides information about the data collection process, the structure of the open source questionnaire and dataset, and the key data cleaning and data analysis processes followed to arrive at the results reported in the survey findings reports.