Picture a girl in a classroom in rural Liberia. She’s holding a book with a bright cover, and when she opens it, the story inside could be about her neighbour, her village, the market where her mother sells vegetables. The illustrations show faces that look like hers. The rhythm of the language feels like the stories her grandmother tells. For the first time, reading feels like coming home.
We’re thrilled to share that, in partnership with TALLE and the WE-CARE Foundation, more than 60,000 brand new reading anthologies have just been delivered to schools, libraries and teacher training institutes in Liberia and Sierra Leone as part of the Teaching and Learning in Fragile Contexts (TLFC) program. These books were made possible by your support, together with funding from Global Affairs Canada and UNIFOR Social Justice Fund.
Every one of the 12 new books contains more than 60 pages of engaging, curriculum-aligned stories written by local authors who understand the hearts and minds of the children reading them. The illustrations showcase local culture, the narratives reflect familiar experiences, and every page invites young readers to see themselves as part of the story. These books will not only help kids learn to read but also spark a love of books and reading that wasn’t there before.
These books arrive at a pivotal moment, as the TLFC midline results just revealed that the teaching methods and materials you’ve been supporting are working. In Sierra Leone, overall literacy among Grade 2 students in TLFC schools jumped from 31% to 46% in just 24 months. In Liberia, reading comprehension scores skyrocketed from 14% to 72% among participating second graders.
Before your kindness, children struggled to sound out simple words. Now they read entire sentences with understanding. There are teachers who, after receiving TLFC training you helped fund, transformed their classrooms with new reading strategies. Today, 89% of TLFC-trained Grade 2 teachers in Sierra Leone and nearly half in Liberia use these evidence-based methods to support their students on their reading journeys.
And now, because of your continued generosity, these teachers have 60,000 new reasons to keep that momentum going. These anthologies, developed for 6 different reading levels, give them the tools to build on the progress they’ve already made, reaching even more students who are ready to discover the joy of reading.
As these books find their way into eager hands across Sierra Leone and Liberia, we want you to know that you’re not just a donor. You’re truly a partner in transformation. You’re helping write a new chapter in the lives of thousands of children, one where they see themselves in the stories they read and begin to imagine the stories they’ll write for themselves. Thank you for making this possible.
Thank you for believing in the power of literacy. And thank you for standing with us as we continue to bring reading to life in some of the world’s most challenging contexts