Firstly, we would like to say a big THANK YOU to our generous Donor’s; AngloGold Ashanti and Katholieke Stichting Jongerenbelangen for granting us funding to carry out this very special project. With their funding, we have been able to donate new books and toys to schools and Early Childhood Development (ECD) Centres in KwaZulu-Natal.
We have realized that we are unable to achieve social impact on our own. This has resulted in us focusing on establishing strategic partnerships with organisations to achieve maximum impact for our book donations programme. For this project, Biblionef was able to Partner with Zisize Ingwavuma Educational Trust (Zisize) to ensure that the books donated by Biblionef would be used optimally, for the benefit of the children they work with.
Established in 1999 as a single project in Ingwavuma, Zisize’s main purpose is to improve the quality of education for children by providing teachers with necessary tools to effectively do their work. Similarly, the Trust also provides support to ECD Practitioners to ensure that they provide the best possible developmental start to the children attending their centres.
For this project, 10 primary schools that are currently attending the literacy and library workshops at Zisize and 15 ECD Centres affiliated to the Trust will be assisted with a crucial injection of educational resources. Both the schools and ECD Centre’s are situated in extremely rural areas in Ingwavuma and although they are receiving very important training from Zisize, they lack the resources to successfully implement what they are learning.
A total of 2620 new storybooks and 961 Via Afrika Readers have been donated to the 10 Primary Schools. Zisize will continue providing a large amount of support to the schools after they receive their donation of storybooks from Biblionef. This additional hands-on training will allow the teachers to use the resources donated by Biblionef in the most effective way for the benefit of their learners.
The books donated to the primary schools were packed in Biblionef boxes and couriered to Zisize
A total of 300 books and 90 toys were donated to 15 ECD Centre’s affiliated to Zisize. All of the resources were contained in a plastic roller box to ensure that its contents can be easily stored. When establishing the needs of each ECD Centre, we were informed that they wanted brown-skinned dolls for their children to play with, as this was a rarity in their area. Fortunately, Biblionef’s Project Assistant, Nastassja Benjamin, was able to source beautiful dolls for the children at the Centres!
The plastic roller boxes that were given to each ECD Centre contained storybooks and educational toys
The sealed roller boxes that was sent to each ECD Centre
The official handover took place on the 26th February 2016 at Zisize’s office in Ingwavuma. Both educators and ECD Practitioners were present to accept their donation of books and educational toys. The teachers were amazed at the variety and quality of books they received in their home language of isiZulu and the ECD Practitioners were amazed at beautiful brown-skinned dolls that was in their roller box!
A massive total of 3392 children will be directly benefiting from this donation! This is a great feet, especially because we are able to ensure that the resources we have donated will be optimally used. This surety would not have been possible without the Partnership with Zisize. We are so excited about this new strategic shift that we have made and look forward to the endless possibilities that exists in getting more storybooks into the hands of our children!
Representatives from the school accepting their donation of books