The Lagos State Parks and Gardens Agency, LASPARK in commemoration of the International World Book Day, IWBD, says in has recorded about 100 registered members since December 2018 who use the park library.

This was disclosed by the Assistant Chief Scientific Officer, LASPARK, Lagos Taiwo Olatunde at the IWBD programme organised by LASPARK in partnership with TOS Foundation.

According to Olatunde, it plans to grow traffic to its park library by increasing the number of books as it currently has only 100 books.

He said it inaugurated the Open Library Initiative last year when “we inaugurated the first library in the park which is aimed at promoting reading culture from the grassroots in the park because from our observation people don’t pay attention to reading books. Our intention is to increase the books regularly”.

“The park is a convergence point where people come to every weekend. It is an avenue for us to promote reading culture here. It doesn’t have to be merriment all the time, you can do a whole lot of things with your leisure time as people can come in and pick up a book to read provided they’re registered with us”.

He added that the LASPARK is also looking to collaborate with home grown authors to get more books in the library and our collaboration with TOS is not something totally strange. “TOS Foundation came onboard because it had seen what we are doing with regard to encouraging reading in the park”.

We’re also looking at getting people who will come in on a regular basis to read books to the children in the park so that that way they can imbibe the reading culture.

He however urged the children to aspire to be successful in life, adding that they could achieve success by acquiring the right knowledge from books and internet.

The programme themed: Open A Book To Read Even in the Parks, held at Johnson Jakande Tinubu (JJT) Park, Alausa, Ikeja.

Story by: Theresa Igata