Help 200 students learn to read in Burkina Faso

Attached are photos from most recent book purchase (November 2019), for the library in Niankorodougou, in southwestern Burkina Faso. The library is well-supported by the office of the mayor and rural council.

Some brief updates about other library support: The Kitengesa library in Uganda continues to thrive. This year a health reading camp was held for adult women, focusing on women’s cancer. Another reading camp was held for teenagers, and a further women’s reading camp is planned for later in the year. The Kitengesa Library Band continues to practice and perform.

In Burkina Faso, we are currently supporting 34 community libraries. Terrorist activity in northern Burkina Faso unfortunately has meant that four libraries are temporarily closed due to danger (schools and administrative buildings are targets.) For the libraries that are open, we continue to do the best we can to provide regular assistance to mayors and rural councils in managing the libraries, supply select libraries with new books, train librarians, and offer salary support for some of the librarians. Our Burkina team continues to produce photos books for young readers as well as books written by young people and illustrated with local illustrators.

In Ghana, our able partner organization CESRUD and its library coordinator Paul Ayutoliya continue to manage the three libraries of Sumbrungu, Gowrie-Kunkua, and Sherigu. These libraries regularly receive 30 or more visits a day- about 1,000 visits each month. They are open for night reading, as they are now connected to electricity. Donors this year helped fix the fans (it gets to 110 degrees during the day!). After school reading programs were held in September and are planned for this summer. All three libraries received several hundred new books over the course of the year thanks to support from Biblionef Ghana and the Ghana Book Trust.

Updates and lots of photos from all three countries are regularly posted to the FAVL blog.

• Receipt for books purchased 2 (PDF)
  
• Receipt for books purchased 1 (PDF)
  

Thanks to your generous support, Friends of African Libraries has successfully raised the necessary funds to run reading camps this summer for 275 primary school students in Burkina Faso.  With the donations from GlobalGiving added to FAVL's other fundraising efforts, we have received over $9,000 with which to carry out the camps, which will run for one to two weeks in each of the eleven villages with a FAVL-managed library.

Because of the success of our fundraising efforts over the past few months, we will be able to offer every student an even greater camp experience this summer than we've been able to offer in the past.  Along with a staff of FAVL's activities coordinators and librarians, we will also be able to hire a local teacher to help run each camp, as well as pair each village with a Peace Corps Volunteer who will co-facilitate reading and life skills activities.

Furthermore, we have received a small grant from USAID, administered by the Peace Corps bureau in Ouagadougou, which will allow us to produce a limited-run of books for the camps, which will be geared at teaching nutrition and hygiene lessons to elementary school students and other early readers.  Each library hosting a camp will receive two copies of the book to add to their selection of reading materials at the end of the camps.

Thanks again for your generous support and follow the progress of the camps this summer on FAVL's blog at http://www.favl.org/blog

Links:

• Friends of African Village Libraries (FAVL)
• FAVL Blog