The Stories Across Africa project (StAAf) is producing anthologies of stories for children from birth to teens to enjoy in their own languages. Stories old and new are in the process of being collected, written, rewritten, translated and illustrated for a range of modern – day African children in rural and urban settings.

ACALAN as the specialized Institution for African Union with a mandate to develop Languages in Africa believes that given the current situation of African languages, it is clear that there is need to reposition, revalorize and empower them so that they can be used in a wider range of domains. Besides, since there is a high degree of illiteracy in Africa, there is no alternative to the use of African languages for literacy and for ensuring mass participation in development which will in turn impact on Economic empowerment within the continent.

From the Organization of the African Unity (OAU) to the African Union (AU), the question of revalorising African Languages in order to make of them real instruments of the African continent’s sustainable development has always been on the agenda. In 1986, Kiswahili, Arabic, French, English, Spanish and Portuguese were recognized as OAU working languages.

Based in Dar-Es-Salaam, Tanzania, the purpose of this project will be to better ensure the empowering of African languages and to reinforce the process of harmonization of the concepts in a global referential terminological frame at continental level. One of the main tasks of this project is to train not only dictionaries compilers and terminology developers but also to make research, support and counselling, and provide services in theses fields in the major African languages.

The number of African languages has been estimated at 2035 (Grimes, ed. 1996). However, this number is not steady because some languages are becoming extinct for various reasons. Thus, in order to gain updated knowledge about African languages and their dialectical variations, which can inform corpus and status planning for multilingual education in Africa in line with the goals of the second decade of education for the continent, ACALAN intends to undertake a project aimed at producing a linguistic Atlas for Africa.
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