We are excited to announce that Books To Africa International will be working together with Universal Channel Africa on a donation campaign to improve the standard of education for thousands of students in Africa. Building up to the launch of Season 2 of its TV series “The Librarians”, Universal Channel Africa’s campaign promises to raise books, funds and awareness for the charity like never before.
At Books To Africa, we believe education is key to defeating poverty and transforming Africa’s future. Our approach to improving education and literacy in Africa is to equip existing schools and community libraries with educational materials such as books, computers and projectors. Without access to stable electricity in most African countries, majority of Africans do not have access to the internet and still have to rely on hard copy books as their primary source of learning. In contrast, millions of textbooks are being thrown away every month in the United Kingdom.
Books2Africa was founded in 2012 by Tonson, Chumang, Gideon and Precious Sango following a trip to their native community in Ganawuri, Nigeria. The Sangos were shocked by the poor state of educational facilities in public schools and decided to start collecting and shipping books from their UK universities to students and teachers in Africa who need them. Today, Books To Africa has grown from a student initiative to an established international NGO registered in the UK.
Donors in the UK can give books and educational materials by packaging them into cardboard boxes and arranging a collection on our website. Our Logistics Team works with UPS to collect and deliver the boxes to our UK office. Our Volunteering Team then count and sort the books into different categories. Schools and community organisations in Africa who need books can apply on our website and be verified by our Education Team. We then work with DHL to ship requested books to approved projects in any African country.
So far, we have shipped 52,171 books to benefit more than 93,500 students across 11 African countries. However, one project that stands out was Project 34: The Children’s Voice Book Drive in Zimbabwe. Led by project coordinator Collin Nyabadza, the project received funding from the Strathspey Charitable Trust to pay the shipping fees for 2,007 books to be shipped to Harare. Upon arrival, Collin worked hard to clear the books from customs and organised a hand over ceremony to distribute them to schools in his local community. According to Collin, “your donation of books will certainly go a long way in helping the children in our rural schools of Zimbabwe learn and love reading”.
We are confident that this donation campaign will make a significant contribution towards our target of shipping 100,000 books to Africa by December 2015. You can help make the campaign a success by going to www.thelibrarians.co.za from 8:50pm on Sunday 1st November to 8:50pm on Monday 2nd November 2015.
