National Book Week (NBW), launched during 2019, will be celebrating its tenth anniversary from 02 to 08 September 2019, under the theme: “A decade of Book Magic”. NBW was launched to promote reading as a fun activity and to inculcate a national reading culture due to research results indicating that South Africans do not engage in reading for pleasure.

#readbecause is a national campaign using available platforms such as social media, libraries and reading clubs to create a collaborated and coordinated approach that reaffirms the value of reading for leisure. Books contain many words that children are unlikely to encounter in frequently spoken language, and reading further improves vocabulary and spelling. Children who know adults who read for pleasure take it for granted that reading is a valuable and worthwhile activity, while being told stories in any language, is known to feed a child’s imagination and contributes to the development of abstract thought.

NBW responds to President Ramaphosa’s call for a reading revolution. This is also aligned to the Ministerial Read to Lead Campaign to ensure that all learners are able to demonstrate age appropriate levels of reading by 2024. The Department has formed a National Reading Coalition (NRC) with the National Education Collaboration Trust (NECT) in a bid to fuel the reading revolution.

“Fellow South Africans, if we are to ensure that within the next decade, every 10 year-old will be able to read for meaning, we need to mobilise the entire nation behind a massive reading campaign.” President Ramaphosa, State of the Nation Address (SONA), 2019