This project was started in 1994 following requests from schools and universities in Nicaragua, Swaziland and the Philippines for used school textbooks, dictionaries, atlases, encyclopedias, general reading library books and computers.  

Since that time HELP has collected over half a million books and computers. As a furtherance of the Nairobi Slum Conversion Project, HELP wishes to supply Nairobi's  slum schools with a basis set of: three computers, one encyclopedia set, five dictionaries, a set of curriculum support used textbooks and a one-thousand-book library.  The Noramera Bioenergy Ethanol Plant is a major sponsor of storage space for this project.

 

In collaboration with a teacher's group (organized from Humboldt, Kerrobert, Saskatoon and Weyburn) and CARITAS, HELP and volunteers loaded the first two shipping containers of 80,000 books for programming in Tanzania and Kenya (September and October, 2009). This program carefully selects good used books of value for schools overseas. The first shipment of 40,000 books is providing books whose replacement value would be $600,000 at a cost of transport and programming of only $15,000. This program shows that the cost of providing critical books like encyclopedia, dictionaries, atlases, curriculum and library books for very needy schools from recycled used books is only 2.5% the cost of providing new books.