She illustrates this with a story about coming to the United States, as a middle-class daughter of a professor and an administrator, and meeting her college roommate. Adichie says that her roommate's "default position toward me, as an African, was a kind of patronizing, well-meaning, pity. My roommate had a single story of Africa. A single story of catastrophe."

Adichie also tells how growing up in Nigeria reading only American and English children's books made her deaf to her authentic voice. As a child, she wrote about such things as blue-eyed white children eating apples, thinking brown skin and mangos had no place in literature. That changed as she discovered African writers, particularly the Nigerian Chinua Achebe.

The continued lack of local language, context specific children’s books across Africa but also across other parts of the developing world is a serious impediment to literacy but also to children knowing the truth about themselves, their cultures and the place that they can occupy in the world.

In India the government has just passed a new bill promising free education to all children between the ages of six and 14. Needless to say many barriers must be overcome to make this law a reality for the five million children who don't go to school.

I was in India a month or so ago speaking to partners of the Karuna Trust about various education projects, including early years education to families with pre-school children and a project to provide schooling to the children of migrant brick kiln workers.

So I was very interested to read about an innovative bus school project which with the support of the UK's Department for International Development is reaching 200 of New Delhi's most vulnerable children - by taking education to their doorstep.

The video below explains how the bus school works, and gathers the views and dreams of students, teachers and parents.

I’ve just sent Bringing Books to Life, two short guides written for teachers working in schools in sub-Saharan Africa, off to the printer.

The first guide ‘Starting and managing a book collection’ looks at how schools can establish and manage a collection of books, including options for the storage of books, systems for lending books, and how books should be treated to help them last.

The second guide ‘Using books in the classroom’, sets out the importance of introducing students to written materials and shares some ideas for how these materials, including books, can be used in the classroom to teach reading and improve learning. It introduces five different approaches for using written material with students: reading aloud, shared, guided, group and independent reading.

Exposure to written and printed texts is essential for developing the ability to read. However, one of the challenges that most schools in Africa face is a lack of books and learning materials, and even when schools have reading materials, teachers often don’t have the skills and experience to use them effectively.

Bringing Books to Life is designed to encourage teachers and school communities to consider how to produce and acquire books and learning materials and to use those that they have more effecitively.

The guides were illustrated by Chitra Merchant and designed my Mark Studio, both of whom have done a fantastic job.

The guides will be distributed as a set to teachers in schools in sub-Saharan Africa by Book Aid International.

I have to confess that I’ve always harboured ambitions to own a little piece of land in the country. Well thanks to Greenpeace I now do, albeit along with almost 37,000 others!

The creative people at Greenpeace have purchased a plot of land smack bang in the middle of the area where the government intends to build a new runway at Heathrow.

You see the government plans to go ahead with airport expansion across the country even though this means we'll have no hope of meeting our climate emission targets. At full capacity, Heathrow would become the largest single source of greenhouse gas emissions in the whole country.

I need to say right here and now that I do my fair share of flying, largely long distance for work. But I also accept that I, like everyone else have to fly less. However in order to do so we need the government to get serious about limiting the expansion of aviation and to provide us with real alternatives, especially for shorter distance travel.

Greenpeace bought the plot at Heathrow to make sure that the contribution of aviation to climate isn’t totally ignored.

Using the plot as a focus for organising they intend to challenge the Government’s decision to build a third runway every step of the way - by a building a strong community of supporters including the thousands of beneficial owners of the plot, creating a legal block against any planning applications or attempts to buy the land, and if necessary physically blocking construction - standing with the people of Sipson, whose 700 homes would be flattened to build the runway, to stop the bulldozers.

You can sign up to be a beneficial owner and help stop airport expansion in general and the building of a third runway at Heathrow in particular here.

World leaders have promised that all children will have a primary education by 2015 but with only 6 years left to go, there are still 75 million children missing out on an education completely. One in nine of the world’s children currently do not have the chance to go to school. Girls, disabled children and those living in countries affected by war are most at risk of missing out on education. At the current rate of progress 58 countries have almost no chance of achieving the goal by 2015.

Send my friend to school is the UK part of a worldwide movement, the Global Campaign for Education, which is mobilising kids in the UK to campaign for more and better aid to global education.

Girls are being terrorized in Afghanistan for going to school: Ms. Husseini is a student at the Mirwais School for Girls outside Kandahar. Two months ago, as she was walking to school with her sister, a man on a motorcycle sprayed her with acid, burning her face and eyelids. Fourteen other students and teachers were attacked that day in an attempt to shut down the school. The attempt failed - today, nearly all of the wounded girls are back at the Mirwais School for Girls, including even Shamsia, whose face was so badly burned that she had to be sent abroad for treatment. Perhaps even more remarkable, nearly every other female student in this deeply conservative community has returned as well - about 1,300 in all.

Building new schools and ensuring that children - and especially girls - attend has been one of the main objectives of the government and the nations that have contributed to Afghanistan's reconstruction.

There's a great New York Times article and photo slide show with these and other photos by Danfung Dennis which you can view by clicking here.

I hope you had a restive end of year break, I did, having spent ten days on a meditation retreat in  Oxfordshire. I hope that 2009 brings you and yours peace and happiness.

I was sad to see today that Helen Suzman has died. As a young, aspiring political activist I read Suzman’s memoir ‘In No Uncertain Terms’ and was inspired by her use of every means at her disposal, including centrally her position as a member of South Africa’s Parliament, to “expose the tragic effect of apartheid”. She used to quote Theodore Roosevelt: “I did what I could, where I was, with what I had,” and what a good job she did too.

Helen Suzman: Guardian Obituary

Despite being in paid work almost half a million Londoners continue to fall into a ‘working poverty trap’ because their families are paid less than required to fund the basic costs of living in the capital.

The London Living Wage, set annually by the Living Wage Unit at City Hall is currently 7.45 per hour in contrast to the legal minimum wage of 5.73 per hour.

Thousands of families in Southwark where I live and which has very high levels of income inequality and poverty are in work but still living in poverty. So I've been campaigning with local Greens to get Southwark Council to commit to paying all its employees the London living wage and to ensure that its contractors pay the living wage too.

As you can imagine people contracted to provide council services like meals on wheels and home care are among the most poorly paid.

So it's pretty exciting that Green Councillor Jenny Jones' motion to make Southwark Council a Living Wage employer was successfully passed at a full Council meeting last week!

In addition to obliging Southwark Council to pay all staff, including staff employed by contractors providing a service on behalf of Council, the London Living Wage, the motion also commits Council to use local strategic partnerships and other arrangements with the private sector to promote the living wage more widely. Southwark is only the second London borough to adopt an official policy backing a Living Wage.

After our victory we've been on the streets of Southwark raising awareness of the London Living Wage in general and of Southwark's new committment in particular.

We've been asking people to have their photo taken with a message in support of the living wage and been distributing our campaign postcard. The photos form part of our online petition.

We've had an excellent response and will be mounting an exhibition with information on the scandal of poverty in the capital along with photos of our living wage supporters in the New Year.

Clay & Gold is a new publisher which if its first title is anything to go by will continue to challenge and inspire.

Social Justice 2008 is a powerful portfolio that features 12 thought-provoking posters by world-renowned artist and designer Luba Lukova. This collection swiftly and ably showcases Lukova's masterful use of metaphors and symbols to express themes that include peace, war, ecology, immigration, privacy, health coverage, media, corruption, censorship, and Sudanese poverty. Her distinctive style and vigorous visual imagination distill issues such as these into deceptively simple, yet formidably brilliant images.

I first came across Lukova’s work in the form of illustrations she did for an annual report for Canadian Pen. I’ve looked for her work since then and was really excited when I found about this published portfolio. The portfolio gives her work a second life — both as artifacts that once already existed and by assigning each with a concept, notion or social issue that is intimately tied with our current state of affairs.

The posters are accompanied by an introduction from writer Margaret Scarsdale, and in it she summarizes the effectiveness of Lukova's work which, in its sparcity makes it easy to forget how much can be read from a well conceived visual metaphor, "[The] visual metaphor is not only a symbol of hope, it is an inexorable and urgent call for action: In a world full of duplicitous metaphors, it is time to take a critical look at the true face of the policies and procedures that shape our lives."

The company drew inspiration for its name from an ancient Sanskrit text which states “To the illumined mind, a clod of clay, a stone and gold are all the same.” This rings true for the philosophy behind our editions: value and beauty come not from materials…but from emotions and ideas.