The organization
For the past 12 years, Libtaries Without Borders (LWB) has been working to spread knowledge to those who are most alienated from it throughout the world. Because unequal access to information is at the heart of the greatest forms of injustice today, we are working in 50 countries to give everyone the ability to be autonomous and to fulfill themselves through unrestricted and free access to education.
a refugee spends in a refugee camp
UNHCR
cannot read or write
UNESCO
no access to the Internet
Digital report by Hootsuite and We Are Social
From young Rohingya refugees in Bangladesh to low-income families living on the rivers of French Guiana, from street children in Burundi to teenagers in Marseille’s northern suburbs, from villagers in Colombia to migrant laundromat users in the USA, our association has helped change the lives of over 6 million people. To achieve this, we have created tools such as the Ideas Box, which today enables tens of thousands of refugees to obtain information, exchange ideas, and plan their future anew. These Ideas Boxes quickly proved their worth in other contexts too, such as priority neighborhoods in France, FARC demobilization zones in Colombia, and sports halls for the homeless.
What makes our work so distinctive is our ability to deliver the right resources to the right people at the right time. To this end, we work in 24 languages and have selected more than 30,000 pieces of content to build people’s skills around the major issues shaping today’s world: education, health, employment, citizenship, and digital technology.
LWB is unlike any other organization: we work halfway between a humanitarian NGO, intervening in the most critical situations, and a social enterprise, supporting governments and local institutions in the spread of knowledge across neighborhoods. This diversity of actions is our strength, driving us every day to innovate and constantly go further to give everyone the ability to be free and to make decisions that meet their aspirations.
In Belgium
In Belgium, educational inequality is a major issue. Schools struggle to reduce the performance gap between students from disadvantaged socio-economic backgrounds and their more privileged peers. That’s why LWB provides teachers, educators, and librarians with concrete solutions, using pedagogical tools adapted to different learning contexts as well as the varying abilities of the learners.
Background
Our mission
Our daily work contributes to reducing inequalities in Belgium.
We fight social exclusion through the empowerment of individuals. We concentrate our efforts in the field of education and information, because we are convinced that they are the best means of enabling individuals to become emancipated. Our action consists in creating and transmitting tools that facilitate the work of those in the field.
Our vision
We aim to become a key figure in Belgium when it comes to creating and promoting content that helps reduce social inequalities.
Our values
We believe that a more inclusive, fair and equitable society is possible.
These are the 3 core values that guide our work every day.
We work with internal and external transparency: we promote dialogue, disclose our results and are clear about the effectiveness of our tools and their adaptability to a given context/public.
All our projects are carried out with trust and respect for human beings. We are convinced that, given the right tools, each individual is capable of taking action on his or her social condition.