Our Story
Africa Bookcase (the previous name for Gemin-i.org) was founded in 1997 by Henry Warren and Marsha Catchpole, both of whom had visited Africa during their year out before university.
The charity was founded with the core aims of facilitating education in the developing world and providing a basis for continued multilateral & bilateral aid through the promotion of development awareness in UK schools.
Africa Bookcase started on a very small scale, giving talks to schools in the East Anglia region of the UK. The talks were informal and contained large elements of audience participation. In exchange for these talks the schools kindly provided us with their second hand textbooks and the money to ship them to Africa. These were vetted for suitability and then shipped by container. On arrival they were distributed to schools by our partners at Compusmart.
Our first IT based project was the Gemini Online Communities (now Gemin-i Plus). One of the most common requests we had from the schools we dealt with in Africa was for "pen-pals". Sadly we had to turn the schools down as we felt that the educational value of an unstructured postal based link was limited and since the likely turn around for one correspondence was six weeks we didn't see it as the most constructive use of our meagre resources. The requests kept coming and we slowly began to think about how we could create a system that would be educationally valuable, sustainable and still revolve around the idea of swapping cultural ideas.
The Internet was the obvious solution, but it had its own set of problems. These problems were far reaching but basically could be encapsulated in the notion that all software on the market was designed for use in the western world, where computers were common and problems such as unreliable ISPs and slow phone lines are (almost) a thing of the past.
So we decided to write our own, a piece of software, that required no downloads, worked in a web browser, allowed five kids to use one computer simultaneously, used very little bandwidth, was safe for the kids to use and was educationally sound. It was a very tall order, but we did it.
A year later we won two large grants from the UK Department for International Development and The Department for Education and Skills to trial the project for two years. Almost four years later and the Gemin-i Plus is still going very well. We have run dozens of projects in over 30 countries across the world and involving tens of thousands of pupils.
As we have developed as a charity we have realised the huge potential IT has to really transform the world and the way we perceive it. And we now do a number of exciting projects all involving IT, education and in most cases, the developing world. Click on Rafi.ki, Webtools and Reflect to see what we're doing at the moment.