Ngo Tran Ai, general director of the Education Publishing House, says that over the past two months the house and its affiliates have presented 70,000 sets of textbooks worth VND7 billion to children of war invalids and martyrs in 63 provinces and cities. 

The publishers, along with several provinces and cities such as Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City and Bac Lieu, have granted VND150,000 scholarships and free textbooks to nearly 5,000 poor children for the upcoming school year. 

“We have carried out this humanitarian activity for the past eight years,” says Mr Ai.

He also says that the Education Publishing House has granted special scholarships worth VND1 million each to 30 poor children who have excelled in their studies.

According to the house, students need approximately 99 million copies of new textbooks for the 2008-2009 school year. To date, more than 94 million copies have been distributed to students.

The MoET-initiated campaign for using secondhand textbooks has helped Hanoi, Da Nang and Ho Chi Minh City overcome the shortage of textbooks as they often face in previous years. The MoET says that 1.7 million copies of used textbooks have been handed over to poor students and school libraries across the nation.

In the face of soaring paper prices, the campaign is considered a practical solution to surmount difficulties of the national economy. The MoET says the campaign has helped it save billions of VND from publishing new textbooks.  

In the 2008-09 school year, the MoET will use new textbooks to replace the existing ones for 12^th graders. As for poor students, this is a big problem as a complete set of textbooks costs more than VND100,000.