Books 2 Africa

On Monday 23rd September we drove to Canterbury, Kent to take 50 boxes, containing approximately 1000 old textbooks from all departments across the school to Books2Africa.

Books2Africa is a UK charity that collects and sends donated books to increase the quality of education in Africa. It also extends the life of the books and decreases the amount of books that end up in land fill (more than 13 million a year in the UK).

Books2Africa was founded in 2012 by 4 African students at the University of Kent as a student project (they collected more than 11000 books in their first year and stored them in their student flat) and they became a UK registered charity in 2013.

They shipped their first pallet carrying 1067 books to Morocco in February 2014 and on 4th May 2019 they shipped their 1 millionth book to Africa.

After unloading the books we looked around the centre and saw people recording every book that came in and sorting them into Subject areas. We then saw a huge shipment getting ready to go to Uganda. The map on the wall showed that they had organised many trips with the books to lots of different countries in Africa. We number coded all our boxes which means we will now receive information once they are dispatched to Africa and then ultimately which schools they are distributed to. This may take many months but we will keep you updated when we receive this news.

This small charity deserves recognition for their work and if you are interested in volunteering or donating then please find more information on their website books2africa.org.

Mr Spurgeon and Mrs Share