About Us - Frequent Questions - Programs & Countries

How do we form a partnership with your organization?

Partner organizations are an important strategic aspect of Room to Read's business model. Please note that our local teams determine which organizations we work with to implement our programs.

To inquire about forming a partnership, please check our Countries pages FIRST to see if your organization is working in the country and provinces/districts in which we work.

If your organization operates in a province/district where Room to Read is already working:

Please complete an Partnership Request Form (Microsoft Word, 194kB) and email it to info@roomtoread.org. We will pass along the information to our local teams. If our local office believes that there is potential for a partnership, they will contact your organization through the forwarded information.

Please note that our global office does not play a role in deciding who our teams partner with on a local level. Due to the volume of requests, our local teams will only be able to contact organizations where there is potential for a partnership in the near future.

If your organization operates in provinces/districts and/or countries where Room to Read programs ARE NOT located:

Please fill out an Partnership Request Form (Microsoft Word, 194kB) and email it to info@roomtoread.org. We will keep this information on file in the event that we expand into your respective geography, at which point, our programs teams will contact your organization if they deem it mutually beneficial to form a partnership.

Can you provide me with guidance on how you run your programs?

While we are flattered to receive requests to share our ideas with other parties, unfortunately we are unable to accommodate many of these requests at this time as we are in a period of fast growth and need to be focused on implementing, improving, and documenting our programs. Such focus will allow us to continue to provide access to education for children in the developing world using the best programmatic solutions.

However, as an organization that is still young, we vividly remember our initial start up days and would like to provide efficient guidance to other young organizations. As a result, we have compiled a document outlining some of our best practices, covering both fundraising and operations, which you can download here (Adobe PDF, 176kB).

Can I sponsor a particular girl as part of your Girls' Scholarship program? Can I get letters from her?

It is Room to Read's philosophy not to establish a direct one-to-one relationship between our donors and individual students. We feel that forcing our students to maintain a relationship with a person they have never met is unfair, particularly due to the fact that a number of our students are quite young and not yet literate in English.

Of equal importance is that we want the children to feel that they are being helped by their own local people, in this case the local Room to Read teams. Having them communicate with a person overseas may have the effect of convincing them that the solution to their problems lies outside their own community, and will therefore foster a culture of dependence.

Instead, we ask donors to contribute to a general scholarship fund that is administered at a local level by our in-country staff. In order to allow our donors to learn more about the girls on scholarship, we publish an annual Girls' Scholarship Yearbook. This yearbook includes general information on the program, photos and letters from the girls, and program results.

For more information on the program or to download our latest yearbook, see our Room to Grow Girls' Scholarship Program page.

How do you address the educational needs of children in developing countries?

Room to Read seeks to intervene early in the lives of children and help provide them with the necessary resources to get an education. We have five core programs that provide educational resources to communities throughout the developing world:

Does the work you are doing in these countries mean you support their governments?

We act as a non-governmental charitable organization. Because we work in public schools, we partner with governments to implement our educational projects, but we are not involved in the politics of these governments.

How do you choose the countries in which you work?

After creating and testing our approach to education in Nepal, we identified other countries within the region that faced similar challenges where our methodologies could be successfully applied. Through analysis of various macro economic and educational indicators, on-the-ground research, and networking with other organizations, we examine opportunities to expand into new countries. Our other Asian countries - Vietnam, Laos, India, Sri Lanka, and Cambodia - are all largely agrarian countries that do not have the resources to adequately educate their children. These countries are characterized by low literacy rates, small percentages of children attending secondary school, and societal preferences to educating boys instead of girls. Many people in these countries live on less than US$1 a day; as a result, families cannot afford the additional costs of school fees, books, and other educational resources.

In 2005/6, we completed an intensive seven-month process to create a five-year strategic plan, which, among other things, serves as a blueprint for our expansion into additional regions of the world. In order to determine which specific countries we operate in, we will continue to conduct expansion studies and on-the-ground research to find the best fit.

For more information about the countries in which we work, please see our Countries page.

What other countries do you plan to expand into?

In 2007, we will be expanding into Zambia, our second country on the continent of Africa! For more information please see our Zambia page. We will continue to add African countries annually, with the goal of being in at least four African countries by 2010.

Furthermore, we plan to launch our Latin American operation in 2008 with the goal of being in three countries by 2010. The specific strategy regarding Latin American expansion will be determined through a consulting process similar to the Africa Expansion project we undertook in 2005/06. Finally, we are committed to continuing to expand our reach within Asia by adding two new countries by 2010.

As always, we will keep our donors and interested parties abreast of expansion plans through our website, quarterly electronic newsletters, and mailings, as appropriate.

Can you start working in my country?

Unfortunately, expansion is not that simple.

As mentioned above, we recently completed an intensive strategic planning process that will help guide our expansion into new countries. In order to select a specific country, we have to look at a number of macro economic and education metrics, conduct on-the-ground interviews and research, and consult with other groups working in the area. All of this data is used to determine which potential countries are the best match for our programs.

For this reason, we do not take requests for expansion into new countries. However, we will keep you posted as we expand into new regions.

If you are an individual or part of an organization and are interested in collaborating with us, please refer to "How do we form a partnership with your organization?".

How do you select the villages that you partner with?

One of Room to Read's key tenets is community participation and involvement. Across all of our programs, communities are required to contribute to the success of the project in the form of land, labor, materials, and money. Communities partnering with us on the School Room Program often donate the land on which the school will be built, the materials and labor. For the Reading Room and Computer Room Programs, the school community often dedicates a room to be used solely for the project and donates labor and materials.

For each of the programs, villages are selected by our in-country teams. There are three main criteria:

  1. The village must pass our thorough needs assessment: Before committing to working with a village, our representatives must be satisfied that there is a genuine need for a new or refurbished school, a library, or a computer/language lab in that community. It must further be demonstrated that the new program will have a significant positive impact on the school-aged children in that area and that there is a commitment from the community.
  2. The village must initiate the request: By working only with those villages that request our services, we ensure that villages share our belief in the value of education for their children and are committed to working with us.
  3. The village must sign our "Challenge Grant" contract: This agreement stipulates that the village will participate in the implementation of the proposed project and co-invest in the effort.

Can you work in a particular village that I know needs your help?

We appreciate your interest in helping a particular village and will try to accommodate requests, provided that the village is in a region and country where we currently work and that the community is a good match for our challenge grant co-investment model.

  1. If you:
    • are a member of the village or community seeking help,
    • are a local citizen of the countries where we work, or
    • would like to recommend a village but are NOT interested in sponsoring the project:
    1. Please check the specific country page to see if we are working in the province/district/region/country in which the village is located.

      If we DO NOT work in the province/district/region/country in question, please feel free to check back with us in the future to see if we have expanded into that area. We are unable to accept requests to assist communities if we do not currently work in the geographic area.
    2. If we DO work in an area where the village is located, please email us at info@roomtoread.org and include the following information:
      1. Village name
      2. Province/district/region name
      3. Name of school/center
      4. Contact name of someone at the school/center
      5. Contact information for that person (written address, phone number or email if possible)
      6. Clarification that you would like to recommend this village but you DO NOT want to sponsor the project.
    3. We will examine your request and consider it carefully. Please note that decisions regarding our projects and operations are determined by the staff in the local countries.
    4. If our local office believes that there is a potential for a partnership they will contact directly the school/community contact after receiving an inquiry.

      Due to the volume of requests received, our staff (from our global office and/or a local office) will not be able to reply to requests if there is no potential for a partnership.
  2. If you would like to recommend a village and you ARE interested in sponsoring the project, please follow these steps:
    1. Check the specific country page to see if we are working in the province/district/region/country that village is located in.

      If we DO NOT work in the province/region/district/country in question, please feel free to check back with us in the future to see if we have expanded into that area. We are unable to accept requests to assist communities if we do not currently work in the geographic area.
    2. If we DO work in an area where the village is located, please email us at donate@roomtoread.org and include the following information:
      1. Village name
      2. Province/district/region name
      3. Name of school/center
      4. Contact name of someone at the school/center
      5. Contact information for that person (written address, phone number or email if possible)
      6. Clarification that you would like to sponsor this project if we are able to undertake it and how you will go about sponsoring it (funding it yourself or raising funds)
    3. We will examine the information you provide and forward it to the appropriate channels.
    4. We will subsequently follow up to let you know whether a partnership is possible.

Thank you for following the aforementioned steps and for including all of the requested information. This allows us to efficiently process inquiries and will help ensure our continued success in partnering with great communities!

How can my organization get the books you publish?

In addition to distributing our local language books to our network of schools and libraries, we occasionally donate books to other local NGOs in the countries in which we work. If you are a representative of such an NGO and would like to apply to receive some of our local language books, please complete the steps above. If our local team accepts your application, they will contact you to arrange next steps.

We do not currently sell or donate any of our local language books to organizations outside of the countries in which we work. If we decide to change this policy, information on how to obtain books will be provided on our website.

My organization would like to ship books to another country. How do I do it?

All of the books donated to Room to Read are shipped in partnership with large publishing houses or through our partnership with The Asia Foundation, both of whom handle the shipping and logistics. It is beyond the scope of our work to collect individual book donations and/or facilitate shipping them to various countries. As such, we unfortunately do not have expertise in freight forwarding to share with other parties.