Material relating to Elizabeth Laird's involvement in a project run by the British Council in Ethiopia. Over a five year period during the late 1990s and early 2000s, the British Council set up and funded the collection of a large body of stories from the regions of Ethiopia. The purpose of the project was to produce readers in simplified English for use in Ethiopian schools, in such a way that students in each region could work with culturally familiar materials. The stories were collected by Elizabeth Laird with the help of various translators, and Laird wrote the text for the English-language readers. Although seventeen readers were planned and written, only eight were actually printed and distributed to the regions as funding for the project ran out.
The series includes correspondence relating to the project; notebooks containing Laird's manuscript drafts of many of the stories; cassette recordings of the original stories as collected in Ethiopia; final versions of the English translations of the stories; and copies of three of the published readers.