Thank you for taking the time to visit our JustGiving page dedicated to raising funds for two 'Room To Read' projects. Please support this fund in lieu of giving weddings gifts. 

The first project will establish a library at the Sukhrasa Government Primary School, Haridwar District, Uttarakhand, India. This library will serve primary school grades 1-5 and the surrounding community. The school currently does not have a library, trained librarians or access to a child friendly learning environment with reading materials, resources or a library checkout system.  Although India has made great economic progress in the last few decades, it still does not have the resources to provide education to many of its people and over 30 percent of the world's illiterate people live in India. Government schools remain severely under-resourced and frequently do not have libraries. This fund will cover the complete cost of building, stocking and running the library at Sukhrasa Government Primary School.

The second project supports literacy programmes in the  Eastern and Southern provinces of Zambia. Because more than half of Zambians are 16 years old or younger, the country's educational system is overburdened, making allocation of resources a serious challenge. Lack of infrastructure, insufficient teacher training and resource imbalances between rural and urban schools are consistent challenges and as a result nearly 260 000 children aged 7-13 are not enrolled in school. Although literacy rates in the country have slightly improved over the past 20 years, the gender gap remains wide with only 64% of Zambian women being able to read and write. This fund will support year long programmes training teachers, teaching children to read and promoting girls education.

You may ask why we chose these projects and places. The answer is simple. Ashok spent some happy years 'reading' at Roorkee, Haridwar District, Uttarakhand and Anusha learnt to read while at school in Zambia. Education changed our world.

To know more about Room To Read please visit their website, www.roomtoread.org, watch their youtube videos or contact us if you want to view reports for similar projects that were completed in 2013. If you leave your email address, we will send you completion reports for these two projects  sometime in 2015.

Donating through JustGiving is simple, fast and totally secure. Your details are safe with JustGiving – they’ll never sell them on or send unwanted emails. Once you donate, they’ll send your money directly to the charity. So it’s the most efficient way to donate – saving time and cutting costs for the charity.