About the Humanity Libraries Project
1. Objectives of the Humanity Libraries Project
- Essential information "at
fingertips" to help tackle poverty and solve local
development problems
- 5.000 PC's can guarantee a continuous high
school level education of 60.000 persons
- Creating ready-to-upload libraries for
hundreds of servers in developing countries
2. History, administration and finance
3. Implementation in a cooperative setting
4. Creation of libraries in local languages and
adapted to local cultures
5. There are five ways for you or your organisation
to join, participate or to help
6. Address, e-mail and web site
Please also visit the welcome page page to
our users
1. Objectives of the Humanity Libraries Project
The objective of the Humanity Libraries Project
(formerly known as Humanity CD-ROM Project) is to provide all
persons involved in development, well-being and basic needs,
access to a complete library containing most solutions, know-how
and ideas they need to tackle poverty and increase the human
potential. The final goal is to include +/- 3.000 essential
books, accessable at the lowest cost possible (50.000 US$ worth
of essential books for 30 US$ to 50 US$ or less for a set of up
to 5 CD-ROMs).
1.1. Essential information "at
fingertips" to help tackle poverty and solve local
development problems
This project is all about Chapter 40 of
Agenda 21 : (sharing) information to solve problems and for
decision making. This essential information "at
fingertips" will help tackle poverty, help take better
decisions and help solve local development & basic needs
problems. These will only be solved if many entrepreneurial
people can participate directly to the (sustainable)
(re)construction of their countries through sufficient didactic
information, solutions and education. A complete development
& basic needs CD-ROM library for developing countries seems
an efficient way to achieve this swiftly, provided it can be
delivered at the lowest cost possible. This is the goal of the
Humanity Libraries Project.
1.2. 5.000 PC's can guarantee a continuous
high school level education of 60.000 persons
We claim that, in whatever developing country, a
decentralised basis of 5.000 PC's with CD-ROM drives, dispersed
over 1.000 places, and equipped with this and other similar
libraries for sustainable development and basic human needs could
provide a continuous education base of high school level to
60.000 persons.
1.3 Creating ready-to-upload libraries for
hundreds of servers in developing countries
Besides the library project of 3.000 books, we
have plans to create tailored, ready-to-upload libraries, with
some of the material of the CD-ROMs we get permission to upload,
for any of the thousands of servers that will appear soon in many
cities of developing countries. This will help strengthen the
capacity of local servers.
2. History, administration and finance
2.1 History
The Humanity Libraries Project was founded five
years ago by Dr Michel Loots, MD, as the Humanity CD-Rom Project,
to provide massive low-cost access to essential humanitarian and
development information to the poorest communities in the world
in the same way vaccinations are provided as an essential public
health action.
Three years ago the NGO Global Help Projects was
founded to host and foster this Humanity Libraries Project and
other humanitarian projects, and a separate logistic unit
HumanityCD was also founded. Now it is a network project in which
more than 100 partners are participating.
Till recently, the project was named
"Humanity CD-Rom Project", but as we will soon produce
DVD and internet versions, the name is now changed to Humanity
Libraries Project.
2.2 Administration
To achieve maximum result at the lowest cost
possible, the Humanity Libraries Project combines different
leverage mechanisms to increase effectiveness manyfoulds. We
combine professional, medical public health and non-profit
management dimensions to reduce costs and to broaden the
distribution potential and international solidarity as much as
possible.
Administratively, the Humanity Libraries Project
is an autonomous project within the NGO Global Help Projects vzw,
a non profit organization located in Belgium. It is also
administrated by its logistic unit HumanityCD Ltd for
humanitarian scanning and editing logistics, manufacture and
international distribution logistics of the low cost CD-ROMs. The
founder and general director of the Humanity Libraries Project
and its logistic unit HumanityCD is Dr Michel Loots, MD.
2.3 Finance and sponsors
The total budget to realize this project over the
last four years has been in the order of 200.000 US$. About
100.000 US$ has been financed by the founder and by the gifts and
loans of philantrophic family members. About 100.000 US$ has been
provided by funders of which GTZ/GATE and SKAT or in-kind
contributions by partners.
This humanitarian project is now mature and proves
to fullfill an enormous need. We are looking for additional
sponsors for the 3.000 books project, for the dissemination of
many free libraries, for the editing of similar humanitarian
cd-rom libraries in French, Spanish and other local languages,
and to create similar network libraries with many partners in
specialized fields like education, health, nutrition, environment
and micro-enterprise, ... Please contact us.
3. Implementation in a cooperative setting
Many organisations and institutions have hundreds
of valuable publications which could be added in this common
low-cost CD-ROM library project. The Humanity Libraries Project
removes the cost and resources limitations with a logistic
cooperation concept.
More generally, there is a need for a massive low
cost vaccination campaign against lack of knowledge similar to a
universal polio vaccination. The only way to succeed is as a
participative project in which everyone contributes creatively.
Our role should become that of one node in a network of many
positive nodes. So thanks in advance for your participation and
logistic contribution.
4. Creation of libraries in local
languages and adapted to local cultures
We invite many organizations, universities and
governments to copy or adapt our humanitarian concept to their
culture and to their local languages so that they can provide
low-cost basic information locally.
Development and governmental agencies in the world
could each create a low-cost library of their most essential
publications and pool them in an open humanitarian shareware
setting. Therefore it is essential all agencies, governments, NGO
and individual authors would start to digitize their material and
would agree that their information can be shared for low-cost
redistribution in an humanitarian network setting. We are willing
to share our low-cost production capacity, resources and
experiences. Contact us.
5. There are five ways for you or your
organisation to join, participate or to help :
- by granting permission to include your
useful information and publications on these
cooperative Humanity Libraries CD-ROMs
- by co-creating this world-wide
low-cost CD-ROM set and network with us
and becoming a full-fledged "Humanity Libraries
Network" non-profit node and interface for this
project in your region or activity field. This will not
require many resources, but yield high effectiveness
leverages. The goal is to have at least one or two
non-profit Humanity Libraries centers per country.
- financially : by sponsoring
free distribution of CD-ROMs, by sponsoring the scanning
and editing costs, and/or translations of essential
electronic information to many local languages. By
pointing to the usefulness of this project to funders.
- by helping with marketing, PR & co-promotion,
by creating a link from your web site to this Humanity
Libraries Project web site, by mentioning this project to
your contacts, and by writing about the Humanity
Libraries Project in your internal and public
newsletters.
- contributing to the distribution
of those low cost valuable CD-ROM sets through your
channels, standard addition to your
newsletters,or by providing one low-cost CD-ROM
library to each member of your or associated
organizations or projects.
Or any combination of those five. So join this cost-saving,
efficient and environment-friendly information transfer project,
in accordance with Agenda 21, with your organisation soon.
Contact us.
Humanity Libraries Project
c/o Global Help Projects vzw
(registered charity) & HumanityCD Ltd
in co-operation with, the 70 Participating Organizations
and the team of 25 scanning/ OCR collaborators in Romania
Director of the Project : Dr Michel Loots, MD
Address : Global Help Projects
vzw & HumanityCD Ltd
Oosterveldlaan 196 B-2610 Antwerp, BELGIUM
Tel : 32-3-448.05.54 - Fax : 32-3-449.75.74
Information and order forms (autoreply) :
infoatglobalprojects.org
Feedback on the content or software:
feedbackatglobalprojects.org
General e-mail :
humanityatglobalprojects.org
Web site : http://www.oneworld.org/globalprojects/humcdrom