Greetings, supporters of FAVL's activities in Burkina Faso! Our girls' computer literacy and leadership program, hosted at FAVL's Houndé Multimedia Center, remains open and active. We have received $2800 (slightly over half our project goal of $5500) from generous supporters like you.
The past few months have been extraordinarily busy for FAVL-Burkina Faso: our library network has expanded by 21 sites for a total of 34 libraries, which is more than double our historical size! We embarked on a four-year project to establish and support 20 libraries in two northern provinces of Bam and Sanmatenga. Most of the “FAVL time” of West Africa director (and Santa Clara University professor of economics) Michael Kevane has been spent helping the Ouagadougou office implement this large-scale project: negotiating long-term financial-support compacts with village councils, refurbishing village-donated buildings, ordering furniture, hiring and training librarians, and stocking books. Our efforts culminated with the February opening of the new libraries. Private donors supported the establishment of yet another new library in Sebba, Yagha province, in the northeast corner of the country near the Niger border, which opened in late February. We are happy to say things are progressing well. Just this past month we provided ongoing training for our new librarians.
As you may know, in July 2015 FAVL held its first, very successful computer literacy and training workshop for girls to write and illustrate their own books. We had planned to conduct a second workshop at the end of January 2016, as Michael discussed in his last progress report. However, we were forced by the library network expansion and staffing changes at FAVL's Ouagadougou headquarters to push back our timeline by a few months. As the FAVL-Burkina team settles down into a more regular routine of managing 34 libraries, we anticipate hiring a director of the Houndé Multimedia Center by the end of April. The new director's responsibilities will include recruiting young women for the second workshop, which we anticipate holding at the end of May. We expect to hold monthly training sessions for groups of six to ten young women until our GlobalGiving project funds are exhausted.
We thank you for helping bring literacy to remote rural villages in Burkina Faso, and would greatly appreciate your continued financial support. Upon completion of the second workshop, we will update the FAVL blog with photos of the new, locally-authored books produced by our young female authors. In the meantime, our ongoing literacy-building activities continue in Tuy province and updates are regularly posted on the FAVL blog.
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Dear FAVL supporters,
Thanks to the incredibly generous support of GlobalGiving donors like you, we announce that last month we met the original project goal of providing complete sets of the Fatou Keïta book series to our original thirteen village libraries in Burkina Faso! Thank you so much for helping make our vision of providing culturally relevant books to our young FAVL patrons a reality. As you can see from the photos below, the books are hugely popular with our readers.
I am pleased to report that the project remains open. Indeed, we have expanded our goal to provide a complete series of Fatou Keïta books to ten of FAVL's new libraries in the northern Burkina provinces of Bam and Sanmatenga! FAVL is fortunate to have already received $160 out of the additional $750 needed to purchase these new books.
I thank you again for your generous support of literacy and reading in West Africa. FAVL relies on the continued support of kind donors like you.
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