Grassroots Uganda is building 5 Libraries in rural areas of Uganda. The Libraries focus is on children to help the children grow with a sustainable reading culture. The Libraries are a an outlet where children and adults can go to learn, create, explore and venture outside of the confines of poverty. Our librarians read children's stories aloud to the kids at least once per day, and we offer children's arts and crafts classes on Wednesdays to help the kids build their creative talents.
Education in Uganda is poor and often ineffective. A big reason for this is a simple lack of resources. When you are poor, luxuries such as story books and crayons are not priorities. Schools teach using copy and repeat, and you often find 5 or 6 children using the same text book as there are simply not enough to go around. There are usually no libraries in schools. Teachers do not read stories aloud to the children, and these things together create people with pretty much no reading culture.
We believe we can help with that. We can introduce some children to the joys of reading; to worlds outside their own, imaginary or just foreign. Their minds can open up like little sponges and the books they read now can help them in the future with reading skills, overall literacy, problem solving, imagination and creativity, critical thinking, decision making, and unlimited other benefits that all stem from READING. Our primary target is children, but we have a section for adults as well.
Having a reading culture integrated into you from a young age has many benefits. It increases a persons ability to problem solve, think critically and creatively, promotes literacy, aids in decision making... the list is endless. The beneficiaries of the program are the people living in the areas where we put the libraries, currently Masese 2, Naggalama, Mbale, and Budugala. It is difficult to count the number of people benofitting from the libraries, but it is safe to say thousands.
This project has provided additional documentation in a PDF file (projdoc.pdf).
