Setting New Records in 2019

Books For Africa is pleased to announce that 2019 was another record-setting year of shipping books, computers, e-readers and law libraries to 29 African countries!

In the fiscal year ending June 30, we shipped 3.3 million books, 146 computers and e-readers containing over 440,000 digital books, and 9 new law and human rights libraries to the continent. More than $2.9 million was raised to ship these books to the people of Africa.

Books For Africa remains the largest shipper of donated text and library books to Africa, with over 50 million books shipped to all 55 countries since its founding in 1988.

Highlights from 2019 include:

• Top recipient countries were Nigeria (39 container units), Ethiopia (22 container units) and South Africa (20 container units).
• In its efforts to strengthen ties on the continent, BFA established a formal partnership with the African Union and attended the 2019 AU Summit in Addis Ababa. We also had the honor of meeting and working with Ambassadors from the AU, Malawi and Zambia.
• BFA established a new Books For Africa Publishing initiative, and worked with publishers to custom print books in Portuguese and Somali for projects in Mozambique and Somalia.

BFA was founded by Tom Warth in 1988 with a simple mission: To end the book famine in Africa.

"We are proud that BFA has been able to serve the students and young readers of Africa during the past year with more than three million books and other educational tools," said Patrick Plonski, executive director. "We plan to expand our efforts and continue to increase shipments this year."

Warth noted that there are over 500 million young people in Africa, "so we still have a lot of work to do to end the book famine across the continent. There are a lot of children hungry to read and hungry to learn."