We are committed to continuously supplying children in West Africa with children’s books for their literary entertainment and education.
Growing up in Nigeria, West Africa, it was a challenge for kids like us to have access to books. This is the same experience with members of my team. In our case, the few books available were mostly written by Europeans. They were imported, sold in high-brow parts of town and overpriced.
Our parents didn’t see the need to pay for books especially when the price of one book could feed the entire family for more than a couple days. Hence books became, for children like us, luxurious possessions that symbolized status.
Not much has changed for the better ever since. It has gotten worse, even. At least while we were kids, there were a few public libraries in some metropolitan Nigerian and other West African cities. Today, almost all of those public libraries hold empty shelves, and the lot of the African child is no better for it.
If something isn’t done about this, we are afraid that we will have a generation of West Africans to whom reading and the value for literary entertainment would be alien. Being a writer myself, and a children’s book author, I understand the dangers this poses for social conscience, the capacity for individual introspection and the life of the publishing industry of the West African region whose standing isn’t presently a healthy one.
It is our mission to continually make books accessible to children of school age, and we intend to achieve this by constantly distributing free books to children in both urban and rural West African communities. The end result of our continuous effort would be that:
- Children will constantly have books to read and enjoy
- Literacy will be encouraged and developed
- A reading generation in West Africa will emerge and be groomed
- And as a result, the publishing industry in West Africa will be sustained for a more productive future as the coming generation will be a reading generation, much unlike the present one.
We work with illustrators, graphic designers and other writers of children’s books to make it possible that there remains a constant supply of books to children in West Africa. Most importantly we can only achieve these constant goals if you support us.