MAINE, Maine — Maggie Indopu is the Zambia-based director of the nonprofit WISE Zambia, and she recently visited Maine as part of a national recognition of WISE Zambia’s literacy programs.
The U.S. Library of Congress awarded two of its literacy and reading programs to WISE Zambia for its exemplary innovative, sustainable, and replicable strategies to promote literacy and reading in Zambia. Its “Reading is Fun” and “Creative Writing” programs are pivotal to its educational empowerment initiative, which promotes literacy and language proficiency, access to culturally relevant educational material, and community engagement.
Indopu herself walked 6 kilometers each way to school and knows the struggles firsthand of working extra hard to attain an education to help brighten the future of the generations ahead of her. She said that Zambia has areas where schools are without electricity or internet, are only accessible by a four-wheel drive vehicle, and where the textbook ratio is often one book per seven to 10 students -- and there are no libraries.
Indopu helped launch and now directs a program that enables children from Zambia’s rural areas to achieve their full educational potential. Many of these students who otherwise would not have had the opportunity to study beyond the seventh grade are graduating with degrees in telecommunications engineering, business administration, education, medicine, and environmental health.
Maine is the location of one of WISE Zambia's U.S. offices since the effort launched here, thanks to some eager volunteers and minds who gathered resources and brought over to get the program started, now many years later bigger-scale literacy programs are up and running in Zambia.
WISE Zambia also has a flagship scholarship program that serves students from some of the most remote and often underserved regions of Zambia. The program makes a nine-year commitment to enrolled students when they complete the program and enter society as doctors, auto mechanics, teachers, engineers, computer technicians, agricultural specialists, nurses, and pharmacists.
Indopu said Mainers can help boost its programs. Here's how:
"I am looking forward to having Mainers or Maine state benefiting our community in Kaoma in any way of donation like books and also resources like technology, which can help kids just soar high and also be able to prepare themselves and stand the chance of having a decent living in the future," Indopu said.
WISE Zambia’s “Reading Is Fun” works out of a rotating system where a pickup drives boxes of books to different schools. They stay there for students to read them for a few weeks, and then the books go to another school. The books are cultural and currently relevant titles. Students are then encouraged to write a short summary of the book, and once a teacher or community leader has reviewed the report, the student will receive a small cash award as encouragement to read more and learn more.
The Creative Writing program began in 2022, with students participating in instruction on creative writing and thinking, culminating in their own authorship of short fiction stories.
For more information, about its programs, click here.
If you are looking to donate books and working iPads or computers to send over to Zambia, you can mail them to one of the local Wise Zambia volunteers at this address:
Joanne Bollinger
8 Colonial Way
Auburn, ME 04210
For any questions you may have, you can email joanne.bollinger@wisezambia.org.