South Africa

With a gift to Room to Read in South Africa, you can provide life-changing educational resources to children who face the greatest barriers in gaining a quality education. Every contribution goes toward the most pressing priorities, including: 

Transforming national guidelines to ensure all students have access to a school library 

The South African Department of Basic Education has turned to Room to Read with an unprecedented request: to lead the transformation of school libraries across all nine provinces as part of their ambitious National Reading Strategy.

This opportunity represents a watershed moment that could reshape the educational landscape for an entire generation of South African children. In 2025, Room to Read will be collaborating with the Department’s Chief Director and all nine provincial governments on strategies to enshrine our proven library model, refined through years of successful implementation worldwide, as the gold standard for every school in South Africa.

This is scale at its most meaningful: systematic change that ensures every young child has access to a quality library filled with engaging books in their mother tongue. Our time-tested approach to creating vibrant reading spaces, training educators and librarians, and fostering a culture of reading is no longer just a model of what's possible — it's becoming the blueprint for national transformation.

Your investment will help support the resources needed to engage with all nine provincial governments — a sizeable undertaking – to ensure this national scale-up can be realized in the coming years.  

Testing scale-up approaches with provincial governments to reach more children, faster 

In KwaZulu-Natal, Limpopo and Mpumalanga, Room to Read is exploring how to reach more students, faster, through the transformative power of a strategic, collaborative partnership with local government ministries.

Across three provinces, we are directly supporting schools in areas such as strengthening teachers’ skills, improving learning materials and establishing child-friendly libraries. These schools will catalyze government investment: As provincial governments work to learn about and adopt Room to Read’s approaches and guidelines, the schools will demonstrate will provide educators with invaluable opportunities to learn how to replicate Room to Read’s best practices at their schools.

Over time, we will transition this work to be locally led through carefully crafted transition plans. This is how sustainable change happens — by proving what works, sharing the costs, building local capacity and ultimately stepping back as our government partners carry the torch forward. These strategies are showing us the path to scale that can be replicated across South Africa, creating a future where every child has access to the books and support they need to become lifelong readers. 

Exploring opportunities to launch Room to Read’s life skills and gender equality curriculum for adolescents in South Africa 

At this pivotal moment in South Africa's education system, we have an extraordinary opportunity to reimagine how we prepare young people — particularly girls — for success both in and beyond the classroom. While the government-established Life Orientation curriculum provides a foundation, our research shows that educators need additional support to deliver this critical content in ways that truly resonate with and empower students.

Room to Read is uniquely positioned to transform how life skills education comes alive in South African classrooms. Drawing on our decades of experience empowering girls worldwide, we’re carefully mapping the landscape of potential local partners and analyzing existing government modules to identify where our proven approaches can have the greatest impact. In 2025, we will test an intervention that equips educators with the tools, confidence and techniques they need to tackle crucial topics — from gender equality to decision-making skills.

When we combine the government's existing framework with our expertise in creating transformative learning experiences, we can create lasting change that ripples through communities for generations to come.