Combined Federal Campaign #12370

Who are Lubuto's Children?

It is estimated that there were 43 million orphans in the sub-Saharan Africa in 2003 – just over 12 percent of all children. Part of this desperate situation, which is projected to deteriorate further, can be traced to the HIV/AIDS crisis.

• 14 million children under the age of 15 have lost one or both parents to AIDS. By 2010, this number is expected to exceed 25 million.
• Because of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, a growing share of Africa's children are being orphaned. Unlike most diseases, HIV/AIDS generally kills not just one, but both parents.

When parents or caregivers fall sick and die, a child’s life often falls apart. With HIV and AIDS, the hardship hits well before children are orphaned. First a parent or caregiver becomes ill with HIV or AIDS, and is unable to work.

Across sub-Saharan Africa, where the HIV/AIDS epidemic is most severe, more and more orphans are heading up their own households. In 12 African countries, it is expected that, by 2010, orphans will make up 15 per cent of all children under 15 year old.

Read more about children in need

New staff in Zambia: Precious Chisebuka

With recent grant funding we were able to identify and hire a new Program Manager to oversee implementation of our various programs and activities. Precious Chisebuka comes to us with strong grant, program and financial resource management experience. Her lovely personality and can-do attitude is making our Lusaka office hum already. Welcome Precious!

World Vision supports shipment of third Lubuto library collection

World Vision has given us the wonderful news that they will send our next library collection to Zambia through their extensive shipping operations. So we are busy putting the finishing touches on the collection for the Mumuni Library in Nabukuyu, Southern Province. We are planning with students from D.C.'s Gonzaga High School's AIDS Club to pack it up on June 1. The final step on this end will be getting the collection to World Vision's facility near Pittsburgh, PA. Our volunteers and book donors have worked for several years to build and catalog the collection, and we're all quite happy to get those books into the hands of Zambian children soon!

Under our All Children Reading (ACR) grant World Vision has already sent 30 OLPC laptops and 250 books to update the existing collections in Lusaka. We are so grateful that their support extends to our whole program, since our libraries, with great book collections, programming and outreach, are the 'incubator' for the technological and educational innovations of our ACR project.

Zambian experts guide our All Children Reading project

We have engaged Dr. Joseph Mwansa, a lecturer in the Department of Primary Education and the Department of Language and Social Services at the University of Zambia (UNZA), to review the LubutoLiteracy lessons on their effectiveness in teaching children to read in the language they know, their mother tongue. He is a member of the Zambian government's Literacy Committee, which is reviewing the teaching of reading in local languages to both children and adults. In addition to reviewing the LubutoLiteracy lessons, Dr. Mwansa will also assist with the development of tools to assess their mastery by the children who use them.

Dr. Mwansa has already assessed the 100 Bemba lessons (his language of specialization) and next will establish a new sequence of learning for them. The new approach will start with vowels, then introduce syllables and their application in making words and simple sentences. A phoneme sound board will follow. Then the lesson developers (teachers, language experts, programmers) will be taught the new structure for the lessons, and teachers will be selected who will make sound recordings of the words for each lesson.

Lubuto Wins USAID Contest for Innovative Literacy Solutions

We are thrilled to announce that a Lubuto innovation is among 32 winners of an All Children Reading: A Grand Challenge for Development grant, made possible through the generous support of the All Children Reading Founding Partners: the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), World Vision and the Australian Agency for International Development. The competition to create innovative solutions to improve early grade reading in the developing world elicited more than 450 submissions from more than 75 countries. Lubuto's winning proposal, "LubutoLiteracy: Zambian teaching and learning materials for the digital age," is funded by World Vision.

The Lubuto Library Project team joined other winners to showcase their innovation at a DevelopmentXChange session on September 7 at USAID headquarters and uniquely highlighted the role that libraries play as "technology incubators." Please see our press release for more details on this exciting project.

Lubuto Receives OSISA Grant

The Open Society Initiative of Southern Africa (OSISA) granted Lubuto nearly $150,000 to support building the evidence base and advocating for innovative, sustainable and effective strategies for ensuring access to high quality educational services and support to marginalized and vulnerable children and youth in Africa. Our activities under the grant focus on documenting, assessing and sharing the outcomes and impact of the Lubuto model.

The Lubuto Library Project

Lubuto is a word in the Bemba language, spoken in central Africa, that signifies knowledge, enlightenment and light.

The Lubuto project creates high quality, open-access libraries to serve Africa's street kids and other vulnerable children and youth. The library provides a safe haven and an opening to the world beyond the bleak streets. Lubuto offers educational services and the simple pleasure of books and the arts for children who find themselves alone in the world. Giving the burgeoning numbers of street children the chances they deserve to develop their imaginations and to realize their potential is Lubuto’s challenge.

Lubuto’s highly professional organization, in the US and Zambia, does not work as an isolated charity. The sustainability of its program is ensured through partnership with government, community-based organizations, and professional groups, and Lubuto libraries are owned and run by Zambians.

Read more about Lubuto Libraries.

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5614 Connecticut Ave. NW, #368 | Washington, DC 20015-2604 | webmail@lubuto.org