Last year, Lubuto was awarded a grant from ViiV Healthcare’s Positive Action for Girls and Women to prevent early marriages by developing a Makerspace at the Mumuni Library. The Makerspace and its programs give girls, mothers, and female caregivers the opportunity to develop new skills, promoting educational achievement and increasing the financial capacity of mothers to support their families and keep their daughters in school. Our kick-off Makerspace activity was a Girls Can Code! residential technology camp that took place this month at the Mumuni Nabukuyu Library from April 7th-13th, 2019. The camp offered life-changing opportunities to 27 girls who arrived with little to no experience using computers, and left as amateur programmers who had created games in Scratch and Python, programmed robotic vehicles, and built their own computers.

Zambia has one of the highest rates of child marriage in Africa, with 31% of girls under the age of 18 already married and a median first marriage age of 18 for women generally. Early marriage and early pregnancy and childbirth are most common in rural areas and among girls living in poverty. Nabukuyu, where the Mumuni Nabukuyu Library is located, is a village in the rural Monze district in Southern Province where early marriage is common and driven by poverty and limited educational and economic prospects for girls.

With a new grant award from the USAID’s American Schools and Hospitals Abroad (ASHA) program, construction of our next library is slated to begin in early 2019. The library will be built in the Kanyama community, on the southwestern outskirts of Lusaka, and will be hosted by the St. Daniel Comboni Development Centre (SDC).

As the saying goes, it takes a village to raise a child. During the first few months under the DREAMS grant, we have worked to build a strong and supportive community network in Lusaka so that we can work together to foster a resilient and HIV/AIDS-free population of adolescent girls and young women.

Public libraries are a platform for linking high-risk girls to the information and services that that empower them to develop life skills, avoid HIV infection and stay in school. This is the promise of Lubuto's new project, "Innovative libraries keeping girls mentored, empowered, safe, determined, resilient and AIDS-free," which will target at least 20,000 15-24 year old girls through our libraries in Lusaka.