Celebrating Books to Africa

This weekend Better World Books (BWB) and Books for Africa (BFA) celebrated the final shipment of the successful “BWB Fund for BFA”, a ‘sub-program’ within our larger partnership. The BWB Fund has now paid for the shipment of 1.4 million books to Africa in 58 sea containers (valued at $10.9 million in books).

The “BWB Fund”, though, is just the tip of the iceberg. BWB has raised a total of over $2.3 million in funding for BFA and directly donated over 2 million books, mostly college textbooks to their efforts. So while the “BWB Fund for BFA” is concluding, BWB continues to raise funds for BFA and other non-profit literacy partners with every book sold.

Celebration of the “BWB Fund” was marked by a party attended by about 100 people. BFA and BWB executives and employees were in attendance but the vast majority of the crowd were volunteers and supporters of BFA, without whom the impressive milestone of shipping over 1.4 million books to Africa through the “BWB Fund” would not have been possible.

BFA’s founder Tom Warth celebrated the success of the Books for Africa to date, but stressed how much more is left to do. “We’ve shipped over 23 million books to Africa, but Africa has 400 million children. The US only has about 70 million. There’s so much more we need to do,” he said.

BWB’s Vice President of Marketing, John Ujda, discussed the importance of the partnership, not only for the non-profit, but for BWB as well. “We love the work BFA is doing in this world. This partnership is an instrumental piece of Better World Books’ social mission. We are very proud of the work we’ve done together thus far.”

Music at the event was provided by BFA’s own warehouse band, and demonstrated the energy that volunteers from all over the community bring to this cause.