Books For Africa

Louis Bayes

3/17/2009

Books for Africa continues on strong at the University of Manitoba – Back in 2005, the University of Manitoba Circle K Volunteer Club began collecting books for the Books for Africa bookdrive by placing a box in the Human Ecology student lounge. What started off as a small project for the club, is now a campus-wide book collection year-round drive, with drop-off bins in 7 locations. It took months for that one box, of dimensions 12"x20"x6", to fill. Now, huge drop-off bins are being emptied out biweekly.

First of all: What is "Books for Africa"? Books for Africa is a program created by Better World Books where they collect new and used recent textbooks to be shipped out to Africa to areas in need of education. Textbooks that cannot be used for such a purpose are sold online for the highest value, and the proceeds are sent in means of a cheque to Africa to aid the education system.

So, what created this success on campus? Word of mouth through various e-mails to other groups was the primary means, with posters coming in a close second. We attribute most of the success to two main believers in our cause: UMSU and The University of Manitoba Bookstore. UMSU has allowed us to set up our first two collection bins, one in the Student Group Resource Centre, and the other in front of the UMSU Office. The Bookstore has helped us out by donating boxes of books to our bookdrive; most recently they have donated 75 boxes of books to aid education in Africa.

To date, the University of Manitoba Circle K Volunteer Club has shipped out over 325 boxes of books to help improve education out in Africa, with another shipment of 100 boxes collected over the winter that have been sent out earlier in the month.

Do you have any textbooks that you would like to donate to our cause? Would you like to help out our cause? Do you want to join Circle K? Do you have any other questions? If so, you can e-mail our chair of the Books for Africa drive, Byron Abraham or send an e-mail to Louis. Thank you for helping us feed the hunger for knowledge in Africa!