Libraries for Children and Young Adults Section
Books for all: 1973 - 2002
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Foreign Aid for Children's Libraries
25 Years
by Lioba Betten
In Venezuela books are shipped to villages located near the river, in Kenya and in Zimbabwe they carry books on the backs of camels and donkeys to the rural areas, and in Nepal they bring portable libraries to children in kindergartens and hospitals...
BOOKS FOR ALL is a library project encouraging this kind of grass-roots activities and fighting illiteracy. It aims at providing children and young people with books and other media. Requests for funding come from many countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Librarians and teachers wishing to establish small libraries, to enlarge existing collections or to improve the quality of school libraries receive support. They purchase books written in their native languages that the children are able to read and understand.
BOOKS FOR ALL was founded in 1973 by the International Federation of Library Associations (IFLA) and has since supported more than 100 libraries for children and young people in more than 50 countries.
HISTORY OF BOOKS FOR ALL
BOOKS FOR ALL is a library project administered by IFLA and UNESCO, which encourages and financially supports activities fighting illiteracy. Its aim is to provide children and young people in developing countries with books. Requests for books come from Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Because the books purchased are in local languages, BOOKS FOR ALL provides long-term foreign aid to the local book industry--authors, publishers, and booksellers--as well as to libraries.
BOOKS FOR ALL was founded in 1973 and Margaret Marshall McDonald (Great Britain) was the project's director until 1989. Colin Ray (Great Britain), then the chairman of the Section had turned to UNESCO and discovered its Co-Action-Programme, which supports national and international plans in cooperation with single persons, groups, and non-government organizations in the field of education. From the beginning, BOOKS FOR ALL has been designed as a long-term international project.
An average of US$ 14,000 per year has been received from the national commissions, clubs and UNESCO centres located in industrial nations. Requests for money arrive constantly; they come from more than 50 countries, in English, Spanish, and French. Often they are formulated in an extravagant, wonderful manner, printed by a computer on good paper with letter head, but sometimes they are written by typewriter, barely legible, or written by hand on damaged (air mail) paper. They come from librarians and teachers, from volunteers of the U.S. Peace Corps or from people who want to do something for their children's future. As Director of the Project, I evaluate those letters, establish my priorities, draw up waiting lists, reject applications, or send the money in form of UNUMs, the UNESCO currency (1 unit of UNESCO money corresponds to US$ 1), in the amount of 500, -- up to 2,000. -- each to children's, youth, and school libraries in Bangladesh, Guatemala, Lesotho and other countries.
In recent years, urgently needed money is less and less often available. In the wake of the developments in world politics, very few donations have been received via the UNESCO channels.
BOOKS FOR ALL continues to exist only because of my belief that it would be a shame for the international community of librarians to desert our colleagues who, under particularly difficult conditions, are doing their best to help children and young people. Happily, many others saw and still see this in the same way, in particular the IFLA colleagues in charge in the Section of Children's Libraries and in other committees.
When I started my as the volunteer project director in 1990, I was employed as Deputy Director of the International Youth Library in Munich/Germany. While I had international contacts to children's libraries, I had only little of my time left for BOOKS FOR ALL. At that time, the illustrator Jrgen Spohn (V 1992) designed the first poster, and the German UNESCO Commission financed the printing of leaflets in the German language. This created the basis of a public relations program. Librarians from Bolivia, Peru, India, Benin, and Uganda, which were with the International Youth Library as scholarship holders in 1991, were allowed to take UNUM cheques with them for children's libraries in their own countries.
At the end of 1991, I left the International Youth Library, became an individual member of IFLA and "settled down" with BOOKS FOR ALL. In my private office and with the generous support of a Munich lawyer's office (handling clerical work, computer, telefax, e-mail), I have worked for the project more or less full-time since 1992. Without the room, the equipment and without the private sponsor, I would have had to quit the project. However, as it was, in addition to my own enthusiasm, several positive things came together. Since 1995, two further rooms have been at my disposal, and since 1996, on a basis of 6 hours per week, a volunteer assistant handles a lot of the incoming work.
Fundraising Activities
The money once accorded the project by IFLA continues to flow, however, more and more sparsely. In order to increase the amount of these grants, fundraising activities - were initiated. In 1997, donations in the amount of US$ 100,000. -- were received! The Munich Stadtbibliotheken (municipal libraries) were to a great part responsible for that as throughout the whole year, they had been selling their discarded books for small contributions. Since 1995, Munich has been the twin city of Harare, the capital of Zimbabwe. Money received in donations in Munich goes to the children's and youth departments of the Harare municipal library - a boon to the local young library users, who up to now have been allowed to borrow only one single book for two weeks....
With great enthusiasm, the Gothenburg municipal library in Sweden on the occasion of its 100th anniversary collected donations for BOOKS FOR ALL. This money will be used to support two major children's libraries in Ethiopia and in Colombia. The tiny library in Addis Ababa will then carry the name of Astrid Lindgren. On her 90th birthday, this wonderful Swedish author was informed about the naming, which is made to thank her for an extraordinarily large donation she made several years ago.
On the occasion of the 30th International Children's Book Day 1996, many other authors and illustrators of children's books made donations. Children's books publishing houses donated books, which as popular prizes on tombolas bring in money. Barbara von Johnson, the creator of a little character in a German children's book, sold the originals of her drawings by auction at a library festival for the benefit of a children's library in Tanzania. The artist Dick Bruna from the Netherlands presented the project with a poster design for its 25th anniversary!
Donation cans are set up in libraries in Germany, Sweden, Great Britain, Denmark, Norway, Austria, in Switzerland, in the U.S.A., and in Canada. Colleagues from Japan continually send large donations. Furthermore, some money is made by selling posters (designed by Jrgen Spohn, Egbert Herfurth, and shortly by Dick Bruna) and correspondence cards. The wall calendar first published for the year 1998 also sold well. The touring exhibition "Kinder lesen berall" (children read everywhere) has grown to 80 photograph boards from all continents. Since its premire in November 1994 in the Stadtbibliothek (municipal library) Leipzig/Germany, it has been shown in 26 places in libraries, schools, and town halls. Through small lending fees, it succeeded in not only bringing in its expenses, but also about DM 10.000, -- for the benefit of school libraries in Nepal, Pakistan, and Thailand.
Street collections, small charity performances and private donations yielded a lot of money. The project has been publicized by two students' seminar papers and by several contributions in the press,
The following statistics may briefly show the overall results:
1990-1997 (status: November 1997)
Africa:
22 countries
- 46 libraries
= approx. 125,000.-- US$ (UNUMs)
Latin America:
10 countries
- 16 libraries
= approx. 35,000.-- US$ (UNUMs)
South East Asia:
9 countries
- 13 libraries
= approx. 50,000.-- US$ (UNUMs)
Others:
5 countries
- 5 libraries
= approx. 10,000.-- US$ (UNUMs)
46 countries
- 80 libraries
= approx. 220,000.-- US$ (UNUMs)
About 50 % thereof came via the co-action programme of UNESCO.
