Africa is in the grip of a continent-wide book famine that Books For Africa hopes to end with the help of The Ohio State University at Marion and Marion Technical College.

Through June 13, The Marion Campus Office of Student Activities will conduct a campus textbook drive to benefit Books For Africa. The book drive team will collect used college-level books in green-and-white “Book Drive” collection bins located in the Alber Student Center or the Marion Technical College Student Lounge.

According to Patrick Plonski, executive director of Books For Africa, the need is great. “In many African villages, seven children share one book. Some village schools own no books whatsoever.”

The United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization, (UNESCO), estimates that, worldwide, 781 million adults are illiterate and 100 million children do not attend primary school, with Africa among the hardest-hit regions.

• 42 million schoolchildren in sub-Saharan Africa do not attend school,
• Forty percent of Africans over 15 and 50 percent of women over 25 are illiterate
• Secondary school enrollment rates average 20 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa, unesco.org

Since 2003, Books For Africa (BFA) has retained Better World Books as its premier agent to collect books on its behalf. Books collected are shipped to communities in Africa or sold online to raise a sustainable stream of funding for BFA. In the four years since the partnership began, Better World Books has provided more than 785,000 used textbooks for direct shipment to the African continent, and raised more than $1.5 million in unrestricted funding for Books For Africa, enough to fund the shipment of more than 3 million other books. The for-profit social venture is BFA’s single largest source of funding and its largest source of used college textbooks.

“The most significant challenge that Books For Africa faces day-to-day is raising money to ship books,” says BFA’s Plonski. Noting that shipping a 16-ton sea container packed with 25,000 books costs around $9,500.

Plonski adds that, “There is no sight more frustrating than seeing our St. Paul warehouse full of books at times when we lack funds to ship them. Every book sold online on our behalf generates the funding equivalent for us to be able to ship multiple books to the African continent.”