President’s letter 2021 Impact report web

by | Dec 8, 2022

2021 marked a year of continuing global challenges due to COVID-19. As vaccines began to rollout, access to them remained limited in our African partner countries and virus variants created new waves of infection, loss, and uncertainty. While schools began to reopen in person, impacts of the pandemic on children’s learning and family economics persisted. Yet 2021 produced many acts of resilience and innovation among the ALP community. Volunteers completed book drives for six countries, containing 269 libraries and over 300,000 books, a substantial increase over the prior year when school closures and social distancing were the norm. Despite logistical challenges, our African partners continued to distribute libraries and train new teacher librarians. During planning for our 2022 biennial Summit gathering, the Country Liaisons and Partners shifted to design our first ever virtual Summit, successfully led by our Malawi Partners in April 2022. And our wonderful donors more than doubled their end-of-year giving to ALP over recent years—thank you! 2021 also provided time to strengthen ALP for the future. Volunteers, staff, and Board members collaborated to develop strategies to ensure ALP’s financial sustainability, deepen and diversify engagement in ALP, measure our impact, and clarify and codify our policies and procedures. You will hear in this report from various committees on progress made in these areas. Further, the Board committed to promoting equity, diversity, and inclusion in all we do. This includes amplifying the voices of community members—partners, librarians, readers, book drive organizers—to achieve ALP’s mission. And as we refresh the Board’s membership in 2022, you will see representation from a wider range of communities and geographies. Access to books and the path to literacy is more clearly important than ever. We thank all of you for supporting the African Library Project and our mission to create, improve, and sustain libraries in African communities.