By Sarah Luddy
On a warm Thursday afternoon in Lower Kabete, the buzz isn’t from boda bodas or matatu horns—it’s from children crowded inside a tidy, shelf-lined room, reading storybooks and discussing their stories. Outside, the sign reads: Lower Kabete Primary School. Inside, something transformative is unfolding—one book at a time.
This is the work of Start A Library Trust (SAL), a homegrown non-profit that’s quietly revolutionizing access to reading in Kenyan public schools. SAL was established in 2012, with a clear, compelling mission – to foster literacy and life skills among learners aged 4 to 14 – Start A Library is doing more than donating storybooks. It’s building a culture of reading from the ground up.
Beyond Book Donations: Building Literacy Ecosystems
Launched with the belief that every child deserves access to quality storybooks and a space to read them, Start A Library takes a holistic approach. Their mission includes bridging educational gaps, inspiring a love for reading, and empowering children in underserved public primary schools in Kenya.
Their model doesn’t end with installing shelves and leaving a stack of titles. In fact, the trust stipulates that the school and its community revamp an existing classroom or work with community members or other organizations to build a new space, including the shelves, ensuring the commitment of the school community to the reading programme.
Dafrose Ambani, Fundraising & Partnership Officer, says that since the school will have applied to be assisted by SAL, there is already a sense of dedication there. The parents join in with enthusiasm, happy with the idea that their children will learn to appreciate storybooks and reading for pleasure.
Nairobi Teacher Training Workshop
SAL offers comprehensive training and continuous support to teacher-librarians and school administrators, imparting them with the library management skills, “Bringing Books To Life” techniques and knowledge needed to maximize library resources and foster a strong reading culture. This allows for the creation of a reading culture in the school, which remains when SAL completes their start-up mission, and ensures that the libraries thrive.
These teacher-librarians work with the children on a daily basis through the library and maktaba lessons and in monthly life skills book clubs. Junior Reading Champions (library prefects) are nominated from grades 4 – 9 to support the teacher-librarians and facilitate t peer readership, while learning valuable skills in passing on knowledge and leadership. SAL curates the storybook collections, tailoring to each school’s needs and focusing on issues that are relevant to each community.
A Network of Knowledge
Since its founding, SAL has helped establish over 300 primary school libraries across 23 counties – from the centre of Nairobi to rural counties in the Rift Valley, Coast and the Drylands. In each location, the process begins with listening: understanding the school’s community, its needs, and how storybooks can bridge the gap between potential and opportunity.
Opportunity and potential are a backbone of SAL’s mission. They wish to empower the children through reading, and not just in the sense of gaining literacy. SAL chooses storybooks with messages that nurture confidence, empathy, resilience, curiosity, and a sense of identity. These storybooks might subtly instill qualities such as perseverance or being hardworking and conscientious.
Group Anagram Session
Reading as Hope, Reading as Future
SAL library spaces are created by their communities so each looks different. But what they have in common is a dedicated place for children to enjoy storybooks. Storytime sessions often double as safe spaces where learners find both joy and quietude—luxuries in overstretched, under-resourced school systems.
In a country where large class sizes and underfunded schools often mean textbooks are shared among students, a child with their own storybook is an empowering anomaly. SAL aims to supply schools with at least one storybook per child. SAL views reading not just as a skill, but as a form of equity. It is, they say, the foundation of critical thinking, empathy, and lifelong learning.
Their impact is already tangible: teachers report improved comprehension and language skills, and parents speak of children who now choose storybooks over cartoons. In these communities, even parents are enjoying reading storybooks alongside their children.
Library lesson at Tumaini Primary School
To help with their mission, SAL recruits parents, community members and corporate employees as volunteer Reading Ambassadors in the schools they work with. A Reading Ambassador is an advocate for literacy, dedicated to promoting children’s reading habits and engaging in community outreach. They can support SAL’s initiatives in various ways such as participating in literacy activities like Read Aloud, book clubs, and library launches. They might also mentor learners during monthly book club sessions. This investment of their time and resources in nurturing the younger generation is crucial in continuing SAL’s work beyond the establishment of the library space.
Harking Back to An Earlier Time
In collaboration with Amsha Africa Foundation, SAL has recently launched the Dear Pen Pal + Kusoma Bags Program. Imagine a world where a handwritten letter can spark friendship, inspire learning, and help build a library – that’s what this is.
This unique initiative connects children aged 8 to 14 in Kenya and the United States through letter writing, building bridges across continents, nurturing empathy, and creating equal access to education.
U.S. students and their Kenyan counterparts write to one another, forging friendships while improving their writing and communication skills. The U.S. students also sponsor Kusoma Bags for their new Kenyan friends, filled with Kenyan-authored storybooks, notebooks, pens, and reading trackers. These literacy bags jumpstart home libraries for Kenyan children who may have limited access to storybooks.
The result? A ripple effect of empowerment. Kenyan learners strengthen their reading skills and expand their imaginations, while American kids learn global citizenship and the joy of giving back. Across the continents, both groups of children are expanding their worldview and learning about each other’s cultures, while also learning they might not be so different from one another after all.
SAL looks to scale this programme to other African countries, the UK, and other parts of the world.
What’s Next? A Library for Every School
Start A Library has ambitious dreams. Their vision is simple but bold: one day, every learner will have the literacy and lifeskills to transform Africa.
In 2025, SAL aims to: establish 20 libraries, with a focus across marginalized communities; capacity-develop at least 100 teachers; impact more than 50,000 learners; and conduct a national advocacy campaign.
With support from individuals, donors, and policy allies, SAL is building momentum. You can be part of the movement—by donating, volunteering, or simply sharing their story.
Msingi Foundational Library
How You Can Help – Now!
SAL is currently on a short, powerful 4-week challenge to support 1,000 children—regardless of their background—gain access to storystorybooks beyond the classroom and cultivate a lifelong love for reading!
It’s a quest to distribute 1,000 Kusoma Bags to school-going children in underserved public primary schools where they have already established libraries. While these schools do have access to storystorybooks, the student-to-book ratio remains high, and children can only read during school hours.
A Kusoma Bag is a personalized literacy kit that contains:
* 3 age-appropriate, locally authored storystorybooks in English and Kiswahili
* A reading tracker to build consistent reading habits
Each Kusoma Bag costs only KES 3,000 and can be shared by up to three siblings, planting the seeds for a future home library and sparking a ripple effect in reading culture.
Sponsor one, two, or even three Kusoma Bags, and help bring the joy of reading into a child’s home.
To Donate: M-Pesa Paybill: 4098451 | Acc: Kusoma
Additionally, you can volunteer as a reading ambassador, adopt your former public primary school (or a rural school!) or share about Start A Library’s crucial work via your social media channels (see below).
A Final Word
There is a saying, “It starts with a book, but it never ends there.” In the quiet corners of the libraries SAL has planted, children are dreaming of new worlds. And that—page by page—is how you change a country.
To learn more or support Start A Library, visit startalibrary.org. You can also follow Start A Library on Instagram, Facebook, X and Linkedin.
