OPEN PAGES Children's Space

To be amongst the Elevate Prize winners is a very big motivation to the entire OPEN PAGES team. It enables us to excel our expectations and achieve more impacts. OPEN PAGES, with very limited funding, has managed to establish children’s spaces in Ethiopia, mobilize students from high schools and universities to join the cause, and also began working on children’s books’ development.

With the funding and support of the Elevate prize, OPEN PAGES plans to establish more public spaces for children, offering access to storybooks, music instruments, painting equipment, and free social events. Financially, our team would be able to carry out training sessions and seminars for children, on issues like the SDGs, Arts, and cultural history.

We are currently trying to open an Authors’-Hub, a center for storybooks development. Children and young people are encouraged to use the Hub’s resources and develop their own storybooks. The OPEN PAGES team also prepares its own signature storybook to be published and sold. This is a platform for young authors to emerge, for the children’s books’ quality to improve, and to serve as an income source for OPEN PAGES future plans.

I am a free and colorful human being. I came to this world with a wandering and curious soul. Whatever does not preach that, be it “reality” or “world system”, cannot hold me captive. Every person is entitled to this right.

It is a few years back that I began to research and question the educational system. I deducted from my research that it was an oppressive system that did not allow me to exercise my own color. Hence, I dropped out of school and began to develop my own curriculum. Yet, the educational challenge was faced by everyone in school. That is why we began a movement called SEFED(Spaces of Experiments For Educational Development). These experiments, all addressing specific segments of the system, try to model the ideal education in small scales and, if found productive, work on its scalability.

 One of these experiments became a big network of spaces designed for children by providing a platform for music, arts, books, research, and travel. OPEN PAGES, together with children, is experimenting on bringing a better quality of education through improving the pedagogy of child education.

The questions concerning quality education have been revolving around for as long as one could remember. One might infer from the numerous schools in Addis Ababa, the Capital that these questions have been dealt with. The contrary is true. The quality and effectiveness of the Ethiopian educational system have been stagnant for many years now. The voice of students seems to be undermined. A change must be forged WITH and not FOR them.

Moreover, favoring the grown-ups, the social system in Ethiopia gives less priority for children. Children-Specific events and spaces are rare. This problem_the Spacelessness_lasted for several years.

OPEN PAGES is a student-initiated educational project that experiments to bring about the ideal and better educational system. We offer children’s story books' libraries with spaces for music, painting, and games. We also host events with children, on which they express their stands on different issues and work together with their peers to create solutions for existing problems.

We strive to create more spaces where children can INTERACT with their world, REFLECT through platforms and BECOME a change maker. We must always understand that children are not only the hopes of tomorrow but also the Citizens of today.

OPEN PAGES is a member of the SEFED community (Spaces of Experiments For Educational Development). It is a broad movement working towards the reformation of education. The educational system, due to its rigidity and inflexibility, is unable to cope up with time and synergize with new ideas and systems. This makes the system vulnerable to “solitary decay”.

OPEN PAGES, through SEFED, is disrupting and revolutionizing the movement towards changing the education system’s philosophy and policy.

Its approach also brings a focus to children; the excluded segment of the society. Our spaces raise literacy and provide platforms for kids to discover and express themselves. In doing so, we disrupt the meaning of “education” and “knowledge”. What is true education?

OPEN PAGES: Working to realize the Sustainable Development Goals.

SDG#4. Quality Education

OPEN PAGES is an educational experiment working towards reforming the educational system in Ethiopia. Our libraries for children strive to increase the literacy rate in rural and urban areas. Our materials and resources are accessible for children to learn how to read and write. In our platform, ranging from Art sessions and events to Travelling and researching, children continuously learn in familiar and efficient ways. Every activity done at Open Pages is in the mindset of modeling the ideal education system on a small scale. With a broad network of children’s spaces in Ethiopia, the path to educational reform had only begun.

SDG#10. Reduced Inequalities

Children in Ethiopia do not have any spaces that are specifically designed for them. Events and seminars for kids are highly rare. As citizens of the present, the lack of resources offered to them is an actual manifestation of an unjust and unfair social system. We work to reduce inequality and halt the problem of spacelessness.

SDG#17. Partnership for the Goals

Through our platform, discussions and children’s projects about the SDGs can be incubated and helped.