A long-term partnership

Since 2014, players of People’s Postcode Lottery have provided funding of £2,725,000 to help us reach more people who need books.

People’s Postcode Lottery manages society lotteries on behalf of a range of charitable bodies. These lotteries support charities and good causes like ours. A minimum of 32% of the ticket price goes to charities and good causes.

Sharing the power of reading

Through players’ support, we have been able to increase the number of books we send every year from 600,000 in 2013 to 1,140,435 last year and expand our work to new countries, including Somalia, Rwanda, Liberia, Ghana, The Gambia and Sierra Leone.

Players help us respond where the need is greatest. In Liberia, players’s support has so far helped us send 181,056 to Liberia, where the education system has been devastated by two decades of civil war and the Ebola epidemic.

The books we send to children are particularly important, and over two thirds of the books we send every year are for children. These young readers rely on the books players help us send to learn to read and to discover wonderful new stories.

Reaching refugees

Today more people are displaced by conflict than at any time since the Second World War, many sheltering from conflict on the African continent. Uganda alone is home to more than 1.4 million refugees, the majority of whom are from South Sudan.

Through players’ generosity, we developed and piloted our Reading for All programme. To date, Reading for All has established 87 refugee school libraries which benefits 66,333 refugees.

Inspiring Readers in four countries

Inspiring Readers has brought books to the classrooms of 296,121 children, and dramatically increased the support these young readers receive by training 911 of their teachers and linking their schools with local Children’s Corners.

Players provided the funds needed to pilot Inspiring Readers in Kenya and have since provided the funds to expand the programme to Malawi, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe – bringing books into the classrooms of thousands of children who would otherwise have just a few tattered textbooks in their classrooms.

And so much more

Players have also helped us:

• Launch our newest programme, African Story Box, which will give thousands of African children the chance to read stories from near and far.
• Create Children’s Corners across Africa.
• Work with player-supported NGO African Parks to support conservation through our Reading Around the Reserve programme.
• Open our first ever Community Container Library in Rwanda.

32% from every ticket goes to support good causes like ours. Find out more about the transformational work players have supported in our Impact Report.