Donate NOW
to help Schools for Salone and Books For Africa together
raise $15,000
to send 22,000 books (one 40-foot sea container)
to Sierra Leone school children. 

$9,500 to ship 1 container of 22,000 books,
$1,000 for Sierra Leone port costs,
an estimated $4,500 for in-country storage and distribution costs.

Our Ultimate goal is to send 1,000,000 books to Sierra Leone.

The 11 year civil war in Sierra Leone devastated the educational infrastructure, destroyed many schools, displaced many teachers and wiped out an already severe shortage of books and teaching materials. Just imagine how hard it would be to learn in a school without books!

The Schools for Salone / Books For Africa Partnership Program began with one small effort by Betsy Small Campbell, Schools for Salone Board Member, to collect some books for one small village in Sierra Leone.  Betsy had a thousand books collected in her garage and was looking for a way to get them to Sierra Leone.

Carole Patrikakos, Development Associate at Books For Africa, met young men displaced by Sierra Leone’s war while volunteering in Dakar, Senegal with Fund for African Relief and Education in 2001. When she joined Books For Africa in 2007, she hoped it would… "be my opportunity to do something meaningful for Sierra Leone."  After reading Ishmael Beah’s book "A Long Way Gone," she attended his keynote address at The Advocates for Human Rights 25th Anniversary dinner in Minneapolis in June 2008.  Ishmael, former child soldier, New York Times bestselling author and UNICEF spokesman, connected her with Schools for Salone and our new Partnership Program was born.

Books For Africa is a nonprofit founded in St. Paul, MN, in 1988. It has become the largest shipper of donated library and textbooks to the African continent. Their mission is simple: they collect, sort and ship books to Africa. Their goal is to end the book famine in Africa.  Since 1988, Books for Africa has sent almost 20 million books to 38 African countries, including ten containers to Sierra Leone. Books For Africa lacked strong partners in Sierra Leone, as the country’s infrastructure was ill equipped to process such a large volume of books.

By teaming Books For Africa’s fund-raising, book collection and shipping capacity with Schools for Salone’s in-country contracts, we can deliver and distribute thousands of books throughout Sierra Leone.  Our ultimate goal is to send one million books to end the book famine in Sierra Leone. Schools for Salone will collaborate with the Sierra Leone Book Trust in Freetown to clear this container at port and warehouse the boxes.  Masanga Children's Fund will distribute the books to the schools that we work with, and many other schools as well.

This first shipment will deliver approximately 22,000 primary and secondary books.  Books For Africa has just begun a new partnership with Encyclopaedia Britannica, so they include two sets of new encyclopedias and atlases, and can include more used dictionaries and encyclopedia sets. Ishmael Beah will also donate copies of his book "A Long Way Gone" for this shipment.

Carol Patrikakos adds, “BFA just completed a project to ship one million books to Visions In Action in Monrovia, Liberia. I think that we can replicate such a project in Sierra Leone. School for Salone’s first book shipment, once distributed to the rural schools, will demonstrate that one million books can successfully reach the student population and greatly contribute to rebuilding this precious nation.”

Getting children back into school and promoting a culture of reading in rural Sierra Leone is a goal that Schools for Salone shares with Books For Africa. Your contribution to this project will ensure that thousands of young people will be able to engage a world well beyond their small communities and to imagine new possibilities.

Please donate today to Books For Africa or Schools for Salone on behalf of the children in Sierra Leone and help us build futures.

You can help build a promising future for Sierra Leone's children.

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