It has been three months since the first official Tanzania Community Library Association workshop took place! Time is flying by! The last three months our members have been waiting eagerly for the elected steering committee to finalize a constitution so that our new association can be registered. The draft has been completed and our steering committee now only waits to meet together to review and agree on its contents. As an association we are not legally able to fundraise until registration as a charity has been completed and so we are struggling with securing enough funds to bring our committee together. We are therefore reaching out to any private donor(s) who would contribute to help us meet as a steering committee to finalize the documents required to register our association.
As an association we have the intention to act as a support network for community libraries all across Tanzania. It has been discussed at our workshop in February that some of our aims and goals should be:
1- To network all the community libraries across the country
2- To find grants and resources and make them available to community libraries
3- To sensitize and support the development of community libraries
As our association grows stronger our hope is to provide training workshops for all our members. In order to host these workshops there is a need to have a coordinator who can actively research and apply for appropriate grants and a supportive steering committee that can contribute and support the coordinators efforts. It is our hope to be able to host at least one training workshop in 2012, funding permitting. Some examples of successful training workshops, based on Uganda Community Library Association’s, are Children’s Books and Reading as a family and Libraries for Health.
Our steering committee members are as follows;
1- Mussa Gunda
2- Kajia Mjema
3- Husna Mahamud
4- Abdul Kadir
5- Rahim Niah (Volunteer Coordinator)
6- Elibahati Abraham
7- Sarah Switzer
If you have any inquiries, comments, or are interested in donating please email us at maktaba4afrika@yahoo.ca (Sarah Switzer) AND coseta09@gmail.com (Rahim Niah)