UNESCO honours “Books for rural areas of Vietnam” programme
The Centre for Knowledge Assistance and Community Development (CKACD) has been awarded the 2016 UNESCO Literacy Prize for its programme “Books for rural areas of Vietnam.”
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Initiated by young Vietnamese man Nguyen Quang Thach, the programme aims to bring books to the most rural areas of Vietnam, develop a reading culture there, and encourage rural children to read to improve public intellectual standards.
Thach began his work in 2007 with three libraries and expanded with the help of funding to build 28 libraries in nine provinces.
In 2010, he founded the Centre for Knowledge Assistance and Community Development and began the first trans-national tour to mobilise for the programme which has to date engaged more than 100,000 people. Most of them are farmers who help to finance it through crowd-funding.
UNESCO started awarding its Literacy Prize in 1989. This year, the prize worth US$20,000 will be presented at a ceremony in Paris on September 8.
