Recently in Activities Category

The FAVL librarians had a busy afternoon during their second visit to FILO.

They attended sessions by a special guest: a female story teller from Morocco. She easily captivated the audience with her vibrant and dynamic story-telling skills. Afterward she met with the librarians at the FAVL stand, giving them tips and encouraging them in their work.

While Elisée and Monique were busy recruiting new FAVL supporters, the librarians had a chat with local Burkinabe author Ousséni Nikiéma.

Tomorrow will be yet another busy day but the librarians are thoroughly enjoying themselves and making new discoveries to bring back to the village libraries.

Michael,
Charley and I have been discussing a lot about the RWA books recently.  It has been really hard to deny or ignore the popularity of these books. Everyone loves them: children, students, adults, parents, books stores, organizations...the list goes on.  FILO has been an eye opener on how much these books are in demand. People want them. Every day at FILO we've had countless people want to purchase them. People have been even pretty aggressive about demanding to buy them, angry and annoyed that we refuse to sell them! One guy was begging us to sell him the books after FILO was over. DIACFA mentioned wanting to sell some of the books in their store. A lot don't understand why we are not making the books more readily available. We've begun taking the emails down of people who are interested in buying in bulk.  The thing is, it's not just FILO. From personal experience in Pobe, I can see how popular the books are at the library. Even in Ouaga, almost everyone who stops by the office sees the books and always comments on how wonderful they are. The Associate Peace Corps Director came by and wanted to buy them, saying how beautiful they are and how great they would be to have in the PC villages.  We should try to think of a way to print more of the books and distribute them throughout Burkina.

Hi all,

Thanks so much for this!  I feel very warm and fuzzy.  ;-)

But we have no money, so disseminating the books more broadly is all about:
1) finding a funder ready to purchase large quantities up front
2) finding a marketing mechanism to sell large quantities to recover cost

Our mission is not to sell books to urban residents of Ouaga, but to provide quality reading materials to rural villages.  Three dream scenarios:

1) Someone from Burkina Faso Ministry of Ed (MEBA) or World Bank places an order for 10,000 each of 20 books, to supply every one of 5,000 primary schools in Burkina with a set of two copies each (40 books for each school).  Cost?  At 10,000 print run we could probably get cost down to $3 per book including shipping to Burkina, so $600,000.  This is not unreasonable.

2) A Burkinabe publisher works with us to print in Burkina.  FAVL takes a small percentage of production to distribute to libraries, Publisher has to sell on their own account.

3) CENALAC finds funding to print 100 copies of each, for distribution to their libraries.  Cost about $6 per book, so if they want 20 books total cost is $12,000. for 2,000 books.

Michael