Produced by the Northern Education Initiative Plus programme of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), Mu Karanta!, or Let’s Read!, is a textbook for literacy for primary schools in Nigeria. It fills an important gap in the public school system, which is, otherwise, plagued by a paucity of resources.
The book features print style letters in SIL International’s typeface, Andika. Andika is designed for early readers, and features a comprehensive character set including extended Latin. This support for major Nigerian languages — Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba — is a key reason for its use in this book series.
While the typeface includes regular and italic styles, Mu Karanta! shows only upright, unjoined letterforms. The design has wide horizontal proportions and short extenders. The joins in “h”, “m” and “n” are deep and the bowl of the single-storey “a” has a distinctive almond-shaped bowl.
