Join the OkadaBooks Drive to Provide Books For 10,000 Pupils

In its drive to improve literacy across the country, OkadaBooks, Africa’s leading e-reading platform, is partnering with Teach For Nigeria, an organization that trains and sends teachers across Nigeria, to educate children in low-income communities.

Why It Matters
Reading is the most fundamental element for a successful early education. Sadly, very few children in Nigeria can read, as there are just not enough reading resources available to them. Only 20% of Nigerians who have finished primary school can read! OkadaBooks and Teach For Nigeria, together with “you” can change this!

How We Will Do It
A book and fundraising drive to provide Teach For Nigeria fellows each with ₦25,000 to purchase reading materials and pertinent textbooks for their students!

This year, about 217 Teacher for Nigeria fellows will be sent to different states across Nigeria (including Ogun state and Kaduna state) to educate and interact with over 10,000 students, and majority of these students do not have story books or basic English text-books which makes learning tougher than it needs to be.

Community Impact
Teach For Nigeria fellows have seen the impact books have on improving literacy; for instance, Goodness, a pupil at Rockford Primary School, Ikorodu, moved from Ebonyi state to Lagos about 2 years ago and when she arrived, she could barely read.

To make things worse, she alongside her siblings worked in her aunt’s shop (the family’s primary source of income) before and after school. This made it difficult for her to complete her homework and get adequate rest ahead of school.

Thus, she struggled academically and did not make significant improvement in reading until she met Sandra Ezeahua, a Teacher For Nigeria fellow, who was able to deploy out-of-the-box thinking to give Goodness reading assignments that utilized items in her Aunt’s shop’s to help her learn to read while at work.

She also provided a book “Queens Primer” for Goodness alongside extra lessons to help bring her along. Now, Goodness is reading at a respectable level. Although she is much older for her class, her reading ability has given her much confidence to push through life.

How To Support
If you want to arm Sandra and other fellows with funds to buy reading materials/textbooks (like the “Queens Primer” which costs only ₦300.00) for students like Goodness, then join the #OkadaBooksDrive where OkadaBooks will look to provide at least ₦25,000 to each of the 217 Teach For Nigeria fellows.

Our target is ₦5,425,000 and you can support us at Union Bank- 0084439041 or paypal@okadabooks.com. Alternatively, you can drop off lightly used children story books (not textbooks), email us at themechanic@okadabooks.com for the drop off locations across Lagos.

If you can’t donate anything monetary at this time, you can always support with a tweet, a facebook post or just by screaming about it outside sharing. Anything helps! You can also visit teachfornigeria.org to see the amazing work this organization is doing in the community.

One More Stat
The literacy rate of Nigeria is 59.6%, which is significantly below the global average of 86.3% and the sub-Saharan Africa average of 64%. This drive will barely scratch the surface of this problem, but when a match-stick strikes the surface it could spark a revolutionary change. Let’s keep scratching the surface till we get the spark we need to ignite a nationwide literacy revolution.