Why it was needed

Because in the Uk there is a huge surplus of textbooks but in Tanzania some children have to share just one book between 40 of them!!!

What's being done

We redistribute disused educational resources from the UK to the developing world. It never costs us more than 50 pence to send one text book to Tanzania. In August 2008 we will be sending 247,500 textbooks to 220 Tanzanian secondary schools. Each text book is worth £11 in Tanzania so we will generate £2,722,500 of value.

Tanzania's secondary school syllabus is based almost exactly on the UK syllabus and in this country books that are just 12 months old are thrown into landfill! This is a totally ridiculous situation and up until now, no-one has thought to tackle this problem on a national scale! But READ International is facing up to this and doing something about it. So far we have redistributed over 150,000 textbooks to Tanzania.

We sort through the books extremely carefully - sending only good quality, culturally relevant and up-to-date textbooks and resources!

How it started

We began as The University of Nottingham Book Project in 2003. Our first shipment of 25,000 books went to
Tanzania in 2005. The leaders of the Nottingham Project were hugely inspired by what could be achieved if more people got involved.
So in 2006 they founded READ International in order to set up Book Projects at
universities throughout the UK. In summer 2007, five universities sent a total of 98,000 textbooks to Tanzania. Each year we are growing and now a total of eleven universities are on board. In 2008 together we will deliver 250,000 textbooks to Tanzania.

More

READ Book Project has received the following awards:
Unltd Millennium Award
National Social Enterprise Day Award,
Dragon’s Den with a conscience Award
Finalist in Daily Mail ‘National Enterprising Young Brits Award 2006’
Charity Times Best New Charity in 2007’ Award.