A long-term partnership

Since 2014, players of People’s Postcode Lottery have provided funding of £3,850,000 to help us reach more people who need books.

People’s Postcode Lottery manages lotteries for 20 Postcode Trusts. These Trusts award thousands of charities and good causes like ours, thanks to £1.2 billion raised by Postcode Lottery players.  

Sharing the power of reading

Players help us send more books both by directly funding shipments of books, and by helping us grow our organisational capacity. 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.   

Players also help us expand our work to new countries and territories, including Ghana, Liberia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone and Somaliland.  

The funds we receive through players’ support help us provide books where the need is greatest. In Liberia, for example, where the education system has been devastated by two decades of civil war and the Ebola epidemic, players’ support has so far helped us send 181,056 books. 

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’ve been able to develop a programme specifically to support refugee reading: Reading for All. To date, Reading for All has established 90 refugee school libraries which benefits 93,531 refugees.

Inspiring Readers in four countries

Inspiring Readers has brought books to the classrooms of 325,142 children, and dramatically increased the support these young readers receive by training 964 of their teachers and linking their schools with local Children’s Corners.

Players provided the funds needed to launch Inspiring Readers and have gone on to fund the programme in Cameroon, Kenya, Malawi, Sierra Leone and Zimbabwe – bringing books into the classrooms of thousands of children who would otherwise have just a few tattered textbooks. 

And so much more

Players have also helped us:

• Launch a campaign to give 10 million young people across Africa the chance to read: Generation Reader
• Launch and expand our African Story Box project, which will give thousands of African children the chance to read stories from near and far
• Develop our impact measurement process and Theory of Change
• Work with player-supported NGO African Parks to support conservation through our Reading Around the Reserve programme.

33% from every ticket goes to support good causes like ours. Find out more on the People’s Postcode Lottery website.