For the past two years, one of the projects we have been working on was our biggest project yet – the library at MPESA Academy, a state-of-the-art high school in Kenya for very bright but needy kids. It was an incredibly exciting project for us, putting together a book collection that will eventually reach 15,000 books, as well as dozens of online journals, audio books, and a comprehensive library cataloguing system called Follett Destiny.

For the first phase, which we completed in June, 6,000 new books were added to the library, spanning subject areas ranging from robotics and coding to poetry and art. For this project, we recruited volunteer library consultants from Canada to help advise the collection development as well as the library layout, and program development.

Moving on to phase two, we will start expanding the library collection as more students join the school, where it will eventually reach nearly one thousand students. The students and staff will be heavily involved in this phase, working closely with us on title requests and selection, as well as researching areas of interest to find books we may not know about. As we add to the collection, the stacks will start to fill out, but already it is a collection to be proud of!