How funding apartheid fails young library users

When Grade 11 learner Sipho Mthembu arrives at Duna Library, his local facility in Joza, Makhanda, on Monday afternoons, he’s not looking for books to borrow. Like thousands of learners across South Africa’s poorer provinces, he needs something more basic: a quiet place to study with working electricity — luxuries his home doesn’t provide.

Yet the library closes at 5pm, soon after school ends. 

The few computers lack educational resources. 

There are no CAPS (Curriculum and Assessment Policy Statement) – aligned study guides and other educational resources, and no weekend hours when he’s most free to study.  

Two kilometres away in Fingo Village, the library has been closed since 2022, after the collapse of its roof. A contract to renovate and upgrade the library was scuppered this year, postponing the completion for at least another few years. 

A Rhodes University journalism student seeking to join Makhanda’s main library was turned away for three months this year due to a broken card laminating machine. 

After she wrote a news story about the debacle in the local newspaper, a new laminator was hastily acquired. 

In the Western Cape, some libraries stay open until 8pm, offer coding classes and run homework clubs staffed by trained tutors. 

Library users can download from a huge range of digital books and audiobooks on the province’s Libby app.

Cecilia Sani, the deputy director-general for library services in the Western Cape, took her daughter to a public library for the first time when she was four years old. “She asked me with such excitement, ‘Can we take any book for free?’ And when I told her she could take more than one book, she was over the moon.” 

“The most exciting part of a new library opening is seeing the spark in children’s eyes when they walk in for the first time. Many come from homes without books, so to them a library represents a new world of imagination, possibility and hope,” Sani says.

The billion-rand gap

South Africa’s Constitution mandates  provinces to resource and manage public library services under Schedule 5A — but the mandate came without adequate funding. 

The national department of sport, arts and culture provided R1.5 billion through the Community Library Services Conditional Grant for the 2024/25 financial year. But this covers only a fraction of actual costs. 

The Western Cape, which generates substantial provincial revenues and prioritises library funding, “tops up” the grant, spending R1.256 billion on libraries annually. 

Eastern Cape  libraries survive on an estimated R170 million from national grants, with minimal provincial additions, forcing bankrupt municipalities, such as Makhanda’s, to bear up to 70% of the costs of running libraries.

Patricia Njilo, the assistant director of library services for Makana Municipality, acknowledges the governance nightmare.

“Libraries don’t really belong anywhere,” she explains, describing how provinces have a constitutional responsibility but municipalities are forced to fund the lion’s share of library budgets. This ambiguity “hinders procurement, development, and long-term planning”.

The 8% problem

What are libraries for? 

Books come to mind, but the National Reading Barometer reports that just 8% of South Africans borrow books from libraries. 

The 21st century has witnessed a new golden age of children’s and young-adult literature, with young adult (YA) fiction print sales increasing globally by 50% since 2018. 

From 2011, Cape Town NGO FunDza developed thousands of page-turners in several African languages for teens and young adults. International authors such as Tomi Adeyemi and Nnedi Okorafor, as well as local authors like Lauren Beukes, have helped spark a renaissance in African-inspired and themed YA fiction, particularly in the realms of fantasy, Afrofuturism and speculative fiction.

Yet, an Eastern Cape teen would be hard-pressed to discover a fresh YA novel in their library. The meagre holdings of the Makhanda libraries mostly date back to the previous century. 

Retired University of the Western Cape professor Genevieve Hart’s research confirmed that 80% of library users are learners who visit for study-related reasons. 

Yet these learners come “with poorly understood school topics for investigation requiring great ingenuity from librarians to interpret the requirement”, while lacking the basic resources students need.

If we were honest about designing libraries for their users — school learners and post-school students needing study space and digital access — what would they look like?

They’d have comprehensive CAPS-aligned study guides, past exam papers, educational software, extended hours, reliable internet and highly skilled librarians. Instead, most have none of these.

When asked about missing study guides, Njilo said: “School curricula and textbooks change frequently.” But CAPS has remained remarkably stable since 2012. A study guide purchased today would remain relevant for 5 to 10 years.

Digital dreams, analogue reality

The Western Cape’s digital success story illuminates what’s possible with proper funding. Through the Libby platform, Western Cape residents accessed 275 194 e-books and 80 990 audiobooks in 2024.

The Eastern Cape’s attempt to replicate the strategy exposes the divide. There were a paltry 407 children’s books in EC Libby before it was mysteriously shut in 2025. More bizarrely, 67 of the 407 children’s books were in Spanish. There were no e-books in isiXhosa, the province’s dominant African language.

Jeff Nyoka, a Library and Information Association of South Africa board member and e-learning manager at the City of Johannesburg, acknowledges that many librarians require digital skills training. Research by University of Limpopo professor Solomon Bopape confirms that while “librarians receive training on digital skills”, implementation is “hindered by resource limitations”.

Crucially, Bopape found that librarians aren’t even providing links to freely available open educational resources — a simple intervention that requires minimal infrastructure and training.

Thandiwe Nqowana, a lecturer at Rhodes University Community Engagement, has overseen the creation of a 400GB digital library of carefully curated, open-source educational materials, including e-books, audiobooks, apps, and curriculum-aligned video content for Grades R to 12. 

Every year, Nqowana and her team copy digital resources onto SD cards and donate them to hundreds of Makhanda Grade 12s.

Why are public librarians not at the forefront of helping children access these free resources? 

Western Cape public libraries have evolved into dynamic community hubs. The province’s Sani notes that Khayelitsha library offers coding classes, reading circles, study spaces and job-seeking workshops. Delft Public Library introduced gaming sections. Western Cape libraries hosted 35 911 literacy programmes, reaching 600 982 people, last year.

None of Makana’s six township libraries are open on weekends because, according to Njilo, “staff are not compensated for weekend work”. 

Dual-use libraries

One proposed cost-sharing solution to library shortages was an experiment to integrate public libraries into schools as dual-use school/community libraries. The models, often in rural or disadvantaged areas, aimed to maximise resources but face integration challenges. 

Retired professor Hart notes that librarians in these setups are typically not trained as teacher-librarians — professionals who bridge pedagogy and resources. “Librarians talk to each other, teachers talk to each other. But they don’t talk to one another,” she says.

This leads to a disconnect in understanding curricular needs and children’s reading interests, resulting in outdated or unappealing collections. 

Hart’s research revealed persistent challenges: puzzling relationships between departments, a lack of capacity in the Education Department, underutilisation by learners and the ambiguous position of librarians.

By contrast, classroom libraries require books and teacher training. Teacher-run classroom libraries could put curated, multilingual books within immediate reach of millions of learners. Yet, most South African classrooms lack these basic literacy resources.

The path forward

At the root of the malaise is unconstitutional funding inequity. 

Buffalo City Municipality is forced to cover operational deficits exceeding R45m annually, while provincial subsidies have remained frozen at R15.8m for years. The municipality has recently declared it can no longer sustain library services without emergency intervention.

If the Western Cape spends R1.3bn on libraries, the national government has a duty to honour the constitutional mandate for equivalent per-capita funding for all provinces. Based on population equity, the Eastern Cape requires approximately R800m, rather than the current R170m. 

With proper funding, libraries could be reimagined as digitally enabled learning support centres offering free internet access, digital literacy training, technology-assisted learning, CAPS-aligned study guides, and extended hours. The Western Cape shows this is possible. 

Just 3% of children’s books published in South Africa are in African languages. However, if libraries purchased the best African language and Afrocentric books available, demand would increase and a new cultural industry would surely emerge. 

Librarians could also promote the download of Nal’ibali and Fundza ebooks and audiobooks, serve as hubs for block book loans to classroom libraries and provide teacher training. 

Above all, says Sani, libraries should be “a safe, inspiring space where children can explore stories, access knowledge, and discover opportunities that might otherwise feel out of reach”.

The Western Cape proves what’s possible. The Eastern Cape reveals what we’re willing to tolerate. 

This feature was made possible by the Henry Nxumalo Foundation which funded the Between the Lines series