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Malawi Book Drive by Roopal Kanabar |
I lived in Malawi till I was 18, attended an international school, I always had the intention of going to University abroad, this made me rather oblivious to the standard of higher education in Malawi.
When I received an acceptance to read my degree at the University of Warwick I wanted to read the core texts before I actually arrived in the UK. I went to the Polytechnic which is based in Blantyre to see if they had any books that would be somewhat relevant to my Computer Science degree, in total there were about 5 shelves of books, majority of which were outdated.
As a group of students at the University of Warwick we have recently initiated a project to collect relevant text books that are no longer required by academics and transport them to the University of Malawi to replenish their library. The aim is to aid to raise the levels of higher education in Malawi. We are hoping that by providing additional resources to students they will have a broader knowledge base than they did previously, leading them to graduate with a degree that is of higher quality.
We have emailed over 700 lecturers, collected approximately 5200 text books and 50 volunteers have been involved. The books were shipped to Malawi at the end of April, and accepted by a team of volunteers who will distribute and catalogue the books appropriately in the libraries at the constituent colleges. We will hopefully carry out a similar collection in a couple of years; this will ensure that the library in Malawi is kept fairly up to date. In the meanwhile we are attempting to set up the scheme between other developing countries and Universities around the UK.
We hope to carry out more small scale projects like these so as to help build a country that will in the near future be able to fend for itself. As Mahatma Gandhi once said "The future depends on what we do in the present". Together we CAN make a difference!
For more information about Malawi Book Drive and to register for future support please email
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This mammoth task was taken on and successfully completed by Roopal who naturally deservers praise and commendation for her hard efforts and commitment- congratulations from all of MHA committee.
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