Literacy

Learning English is viewed as a “road to freedom” by refugees from Darfur, says Anne Goddard, CORD’s Education Programme Manager for Chad. It is critical to their chance of enrollment in university. However, the road currently available in the Bredjing, Treguine, and Gaga Camps is bumpy at best, paved with a small assortment of outdated books that are difficult for the refugees to use. Help us build them a highway by providing the well-established, familiar, and user-friendly Headway English Course that they so badly desire.

The adult literacy rate of Chad is abysmally low, only 25.7%, the third lowest of 177 countries reported on by the United Nations Development Programme. For Chadian women, the situation is even more dire. Book Wish Foundation is excited to partner with CORD to improve literacy classes for 2,500 villagers — 60% of them women — in 11 villages in eastern Chad.

To enhance the value of French and Arabic literacy classes for 2,500 students in 11 villages in eastern Chad, Book Wish Foundation requests your help to provide mini-libraries of 50 easy reading books for each village. The books will be at an appropriate reading level for the newly literate, and will cover topics of local need and interest. These will be some of the first real books the students will ever read!

“There is a great need” for English-Arabic and French-Arabic dictionaries in refugee camps and villages in Eastern Chad, according to our on-the-ground partner CORD. For the refugees from Darfur, who view learning English as a “road to freedom,” English-Arabic dictionaries can turbo-charge their studies. For the Chadian villagers, who are enrolled in the thousands in literacy and early school programs, knowledge of French, an official language of Chad, can give them greater opportunities in life.