New libraries are opening across Swaziland this spring, thanks to the efforts of volunteers in California, Michigan, Illinois, Ohio, Washington, North Carolina and Florida.  The African Library Project’s latest push — into Swaziland, a tiny country surrounded by South Africa and Mozambique — is putting books in the hands of young readers across the nation, most of whom have never had the chance to check out a book.
 
Swaziland has 15 public libraries, but many of the nation’s 1.1 million residents live too far away to borrow books. “People living in the rural areas do not get access to the libraries,” said Dudu Dlamini, who is helping distribute the books to school libraries. “The books will go a long way, since it will be a new experience for children to take books home.”
 
The 20,000 books were collected by African Library Project volunteers throughout the USA and traveled to Swaziland in a shipping container that arrived Feb. 18 to the cheers of librarians Loquala Khumalo and Rachel Nkwanyana.  Khumalo and her colleague, Victoria Khumalo, had traveled to the first African Partners Summit in Botswana in October.  The Swazi team learned the best practices of other librarians developing small libraries in rural Africa in partnership with the African Library Project and shared their own experiences.
 
“From the moment Victoria Khumalo first contacted us about a potential partnership with the Swaziland National Library Service, the relationship seemed like a great fit,” said Chris Bradshaw, ALP founder and president. “The Swazi librarians were frustrated because they had no books to do their job of starting libraries in Swaziland’s primary and secondary schools and getting books is ALP’s specialty. They are eagerly getting their first crop of ALP libraries underway and looking forward to more.  We are all excited by the early progress in establishing new libraries in Swaziland.”
 
The ALP books will establish 18 libraries in schools across Swaziland. The Swaziland National Library Service trained 84 teachers from 42 schools in March to help prepare them for their new libraries. Many of those teachers traveled to Manzini on Feb. 19 to pick up their books, which range from science texts to children’s fiction.  “There was laughter all the way as they were collecting their books,” Dlamini reported. Each library has about 1,000 books.
 
ALP volunteers are collecting books for another shipment to Swaziland. The books are packed in cardboard boxes and carefully labeled by volunteers, who also raise the money to pay for shipping the books to Africa. It costs about $500 to send 1,000 books to Africa using ALP’s container system. ALP hopes to collect enough books to start 35 libraries, filling another 20-foot shipping container that will be sent in early July to Swaziland.
 
The new libraries will dramatically expand reading opportunities for Swazi children”, Dlamini said. At the teacher training, one teacher told how he spent his own money on a newspaper every day so his students would have the chance to read. “The teacher said that after having inculcated the culture of reading in those (children), the pass-rate at his school improved tremendously,” Dlamini added..
 
Reading expands the opportunities available to Swazi citizens, exposing them to new careers and preparing them for higher education, Dlamini said. Swazis with some education used to choose nursing or teaching, because those were the careers they knew. Now, more young people are studying to become engineers, doctors, pharmacists, pilots and economists. “Exposure to books and reading has opened a whole new world to them,” she said.
 
Librarians hope to have 10 of the libraries running by the end of May and all 18 libraries in operation by the end of August. Victoria Khumalo and Loquala Kumalo, along with Nkwanyana, Dlamini and senior library assistant Happy Mkhabela, will visit the schools to ensure the libraries are operating well. Some schools don’t have a room available to use as a library and others don’t have shelving or the money to build shelves, so the teachers will have to be creative in setting up the libraries. Most of the 84 teachers trained as new librarians were women, but 13 male teachers took part.
 
In addition to the book collections, each library included a complete set of JAWS HIV/AIDS Readers for children, thanks to donations from Ladera Community Church in Portola Valley, CA, and a discount from the books’ British publishers, Pearson Education. These are 24 information and storybooks for all school levels, offering personal experiences and accounts in areas such as HIV education, gender, power, human rights, death, loss and grief.

The African Library Project has established 283 libraries in Africa since 2005. The libraries, collected by primarily U.S. residents, are operating in eight countries: Nigeria, Cameroon, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Botswana, Swaziland, and Lesotho. ALP operates on a shoe-string budget with an all-volunteer staff. Volunteers in fifteen states are collecting books now for libraries bound for Swaziland and Malawi. To learn more about collecting and sending a library to Africa, check the book drive guidelines in the How to Help section of this website.