Using Books to Build a Ladder Out of Poverty

By CALVIN YANG

Published: April 29, 2013

HONG KONG — John J. Wood is the founder of Room to Read, a U.S.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to improving literacy in developing countries, particularly in Asia and Africa.

He left his job at Microsoft in 1999 to found the charity, which has opened 15,000 libraries and 1,600 schools and published more than 850 original children’s books. It has also enrolled 20,000 girls in a program just for girls’ education. Room to Read is now the size of a corporation itself, with 10,000 volunteers in 53 cities.

Q. Where did the idea come from?

A. The seed for Room to Read was planted in 1998 when I took a much-needed vacation from my rewarding but challenging job at Microsoft to trek in the Himalayas in Nepal.

Completely by chance, I met a Nepalese education officer while hiking one day, and he invited me to visit a school in a neighboring village. While at the school, I was introduced to the headmaster, who offered a tour. After visiting the classrooms, he showed me the library, which was just an empty room with a selection of books so scarce and precious they had to be locked away in a cabinet.

The books were backpacker castoffs, completely inaccessible both physically and intellectually to the children they were intended for. There were about 450 students at the school but no children’s books. That seemed like a real lost opportunity to me, so I vowed to help the school set up a real, functioning library.

One year later, I returned to the school with 3,000 books on the backs of six rented donkeys.

Q. How does education fit in with development?

A. Education is one issue that has a ripple effect. Educated people work their way out of poverty, and educated people have much more stable societies. So if you get education right, you get every other issue right. The problems in developing countries get worse by the day, and every day we lose a day we don’t get back.

If you can give these kids at a young age a school with great teachers, a library with great books and great librarians who encourage them to read, you are going to fire their imagination.

Q. What are some pitfalls charities fall into when they work far from home?

A. I think so much of international charity is really badly done because people go in and they just dump a bunch of food or used T-shirts or subsidized grains in the markets, and that just treats the local people as passive aid recipients.

Q. What’s the alternative?

A. The community involvement in our projects is important. Room to Read is not about well-meaning foreigners going into a community to build a school or a library. Everything is based on a self-help model. The local communities contribute land, labor, teachers and librarians.

Things get done because the local people are investing in their own solution, and that is going to make the projects more sustainable over the long run because it wasn’t a free gift from overseas.

Q. What response do you get when you fund-raise in more affluent Asian cities?

A. Four of our biggest chapters are actually here in Asia — Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney and Tokyo. Room to Read’s Hong Kong chapter has been the No. 1 fund-raising chapter for seven consecutive years.

I think people in Hong Kong, I think they realized that we all got lucky being born where we were born and being in a society where the government has enough money to educate us.

So many people in Hong Kong have traveled in Laos, Sri Lanka, Nepal, India. The lack of opportunities for children is not a foreign concept for somebody who has traveled to the poorer parts of Asia.

Q. How do you get rich kids involved?

A. We have a program called Students Helping Students, where schools in Hong Kong and Singapore raise money for Room to Read.

Schools have done what they called a “sponsored silence,” where the kids go home at night and they tell their parents, for a hundred Hong Kong dollars an hour, they will stay quiet and they will raise money that way. They are tying in with other stuff that is considered desirable by the parents. Read-a-thons are a good example. Kids put down their iPhones and they stop playing Angry Birds, and they pick books up. These kids are getting smarter, but then they are also helping kids in the developing world.

Q. Are there plans to expand past the 10 countries where you currently work?

A. We have our sights set on Indonesia, and we really want to expand our programs into the region as we see great opportunities to raise communities up through education. If we can raise seed funding this year, then we will be ready to start opening schools and libraries in Indonesia next year. We are also keeping a very close eye on Myanmar, and we plan to go to South America and Central America at some point.

Q. Do you miss corporate life?

A. In the early days, I missed the financial security, having a regular paycheck and having a status in a leading technology company. But the journey has been incredible so far. I have met some amazing people along the way, and lives are being changed by education.

I don’t think I will ever go back to a for-profit world.

Q. How did you set your goal of helping 10 million children by 2015?

A. We set a goal of benefiting 10 million children when we first started Room to Read because we wanted to put a stake in the ground and commit to scaling our impact.

The statistics are too large to ignore — 200 million kids woke up this morning in the developing world and didn’t go to school, and nearly 800 million people are illiterate. We have to “go big or go home” on this issue.

We originally aspired to reach 10 million children by 2020, and now we are going to reach that goal five years early.

Q. What’s next?

A. The big goal for us once we reach 10 million kids is to not stop there but to be part of a global movement. We believe when the history of this century is written, there will be a chapter that was all about reversing the notion that any child will ever be told that they were born in the wrong place and at the wrong time, to the wrong parents, and they therefore do not get educated. We think that that idea belongs to the scrap heap of human history.

And the solution is not expensive. Two hundred and fifty dollars puts a girl in school for a year; $5,000 opens a library serving 400 children. These are immediately deployable solutions to transform children’s lives through education, so shame on us if we don’t think big.