News

When Andrea Malenya moved to Botswana, leaving behind her Mayo Clinic job and her Rochester home for a stint as a Peace Corps volunteer, it was strictly viewed as a short-term thing. She never imagined that the South African country would become her home. Nor that her work would revolve around her love of books and helping to instill a culture of reading in the country.

Books for Africa was proud to recently host our Nigerian partner, Sir Emeka Offor, at our Atlanta warehouse, accompanied by the Nigerian Minister of Health. Sir Emeka and his team inspected 11 containers of books that we have staged for shipment to his facility in Nigeria in the few weeks!

Books For Africa was honored to receive the “Friend of the Community” award at the 8th African Awards Gala in October at Target Headquarters in Minneapolis. The award recognizes BFA’s work shipping over 46 million books, serving every continent in Africa, while working in close partnership with African diaspora around the world.

A collaboration between the Federal Judiciary Center, Thomson Reuters and the Books For Africa Law and Democracy Initiative resulted in the 2019 shipment of a 40ft sea container to the Namibia Ministry of Education, with more than 35,000 books to support human rights and the rule of law in the country.

On February 20, 2019, I was invited by members of the Bar Association of Sierra Leone for a formal ceremony to show gratitude to Thomson Reuters and Books For Africa, and to acknowledge receipt of the shipment of books that were sent to Freetown by Books for Africa for their law library. The full collection of new latest edition law books was provided by Thomson Reuters.

From the beginning of its story, Read To Recovery’s plot continues to thicken as the program continues to thrive. Having started off with an idea to help provide schools, health centers and hospitals over in the South African country of Eswatinia — formerly known as Swaziland before its new name change in 2018 — get access to reading material for patients who were recovering from various treatments and procedures.