By Deborah Garvey, PhD | FAVL Treasurer & Director
Dear FAVL supporters,
FAVL’s multi-media center in Houndé, Burkina Faso, produces inexpensive, high-quality, culturally relevant books that are written and illustrated by local authors, storytellers, illustrators and photographers. To date, you and other generous GlobalGiving donors have contributed $2575 (roughly 45 percent of our funding needs) for the Girls’ Computer Literacy and Leadership Project, which provides local high school girls the opportunity to augment their computer literacy skills as well as technical research, writing, drawing and photography skills, as they produce and publish their own books. Our project’s goals also include building these young women’s self-confidence to help them in their future professional careers. We need to raise at least another $2,000 to be able to purchase the computers, benches and work tables necessary for implementing the computer-skills aspect of the project with area young women.
In the meantime, we are still utilizing the resources of the Houndé center, in cooperation with the local FAVL team and local authors, to produce timely and relevant books for the community. La Grève des Bozo is the most recently published of the center's locally produced book. In the fall, we published an important Ebola information pamphlet, Parlons du virus l'Ebola, to provide critical health information to our library patrons and the girls participating in our health literacy reading clubs.
We are also progressing on a complementary girl-focused literacy project. Our pilot girls’ health literacy reading club project, funded by EIFL, allowed five FAVL libraries to purchase six smartphones apiece for a health literacy-focused reading club of ten young women in each library. The project is flourishing. The participants meet regularly to discuss vital health information, including malaria prevention, reducing infectious disease transmission, and family planning. Participants are writing and illustrating their own books, on a health topic of their choosing, which FAVL will publish at the Houndé center to distribute to our member libraries as well as the wider community.
We are grateful for your past support of and faith in FAVL's Girls' Computer Literacy and Leadership Project. We respectfully ask for your continued financial support so can really get the computer-skills aspect of the program rolling at the Houndé multimedia center!
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