Many places in Africa suffer from a severe shortage of books. This hinders the development of a reading culture, literacy and education. The African Library Project addresses this issue by providing books for library projects all over the continent.
African Library Project: Changing Lives, Book by Book The African Library Project (ALP) was founded in 2005 by Chris Bradshaw to create small libraries in rural Africa, where books are extremely scarce. In just five years, the U.S.-based, grassroots organization has established 561 small libraries that serve over half a million children and adults in eight African countries: Botswana, Cameroon, Malawi, Lesotho, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Zambia, and Nigeria.
The project began when Chris visited rural Lesotho on a family vacation in 2005. On a horseback tour of hillside villages, she saw hundreds of schoolchildren in classrooms – with no books whatsoever. Chris made an offer to local community leaders: if they provided space and staff for a library and gave free and equal access to all, she would send 1000 carefully selected books to stock the shelves. A few months later, the first ALP library was born!
Chris realized that U.S. homes are filled with books that are no longer read…so let’s get them to people who really need them and will treasure them! ALP’s approach is to recruit volunteers to run book drives in U.S. schools, youth groups, and businesses. Each book drive collects 1000 gently used books and raises $500 to help pay for shipping the books. Fundraising is often creative, ranging from selling lemonade or cookies to putting on theatrical performances. The volunteers sort and pack the books, then label the boxes to arrive at a pre-selected African village. To keep costs low, ALP ships entire land-sea containers that hold 30-60 libraries (30,000 to 60,000 books) at a time.
ALP has formed solid partnerships with a variety of African NGOs and government organizations. Each African partner organization specializes in library development or education and is large enough to develop and sustain 30-60 libraries per year. The African partner selects and vets local library projects, receives and distributes containers of books, and trains local teacher-librarians. Each local library project provides the space, staff, furniture and a library management committee. The committee turns the boxes of donated books into a sustainable library and ensures that the books circulate widely among the community’s readers. HIV/AIDS is a crippling problem in many African countries that get ALP libraries, so the African Library Project raises extra funds to donate HIV/AIDS books that are written specifically for African children. The books provide rural youth with accurate information about the cause and transmission of the virus, so they can act to protect themselves.
The African Library Project has no paid staff. Its dedicated volunteers have already mobilized over 25,000 American youth and adults to collect, sort, pack and ship over 600,000 gently used books, valued at $6,000,000, to African rural schools and villages.
ALP has sparked a social movement with volunteers from ages 8 to 80. This allows thousands of U.S. volunteers, mostly children, to make a concrete, personal difference for other children. Meanwhile, thousands of African children are learning and growing daily. Everybody wins as the African Library Project pursues its vision of “Changing Lives, Book by Book.”
The African Library Project is a great fan of the Golden Baobab Prize for African children’s literature. They are proud to sponsor this year’s Rising Writer Award. For more info on how to organize a book drive so you can start a library in Africa, visit: www.africanlibraryproject.org
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