A literacy program in South Sudan shows how global organizations now under threat work together
by Charles Cogan
As international assistance programs come under intense scrutiny and resources continue to be cut, my experience as a Peace Corps Volunteer has demonstrated the linkages between organizations seeking to create a more just and equitable world.
In 1983, when I was heading off to Peace Corps service in Togo, a friend of the family told me that I should take good notes since Africa’s history was fascinating and I might want to study it further when I got home. Having grown up in a small town in Missouri, I shook my head since I did not know enough about Africa to spark any interest. All of that changed quickly once I was working on a joint Peace Corps/USAID agricultural project in the north of Togo. There were so many partners it took a while to learn how to manage the complexity. USAID provided the funding for training and loans to help farmers purchase equipment, including a technical support team of experts. Peace Corps provided volunteers to serve as counterparts to mid-level managers in the Ministry of Rural Development. The United Nations set up a factory in Togo that produced the moldboard plows and replacement parts to allow farmers to obtain and repair the equipment they would need to transition from farming by hand to using oxen to till their soil. The project was quite successful, with a loan reimbursement rate of well over 90% of the farmers paying back the money lent to them to purchase this equipment. The project made a real difference during a time when the fuel crisis of the early 1980s made plowing by tractor prohibitively expensive.
Working in English, French and local African languages built my linguistic skills, enabling my ability to identify and reach out to partners for assistance. These are skills that have served me ever since as a Rotarian, an educator, and a non-profit volunteer leader in the USA while many others have gone on to careers in international service.
From Small Beginnings
In 2023, I had the chance to work for the African Leadership Academy (ALA) in South Africa as a temporary admissions officer while they hired and trained new staff. In the process, I interviewed more than twenty bright young students from South Sudan for an ALA scholarship, as well as more than fifty students from other Francophone countries across the continent. Several of them mentioned the EduPower Youth Foundation, founded by ALA graduates to support schools and small-town libraries with books. They spoke of the impact they made as volunteers with EduPower, such as when they helped to purchase over 500 books for Kenyan libraries. Since I was a board member of Books For Africa (BFA) (the largest shipper of new and gently used books to the African continent) this seemed to be an area where I could help. The eventual project developed into something much better and more extensive than anyone could have hoped for, all due to the power of partnerships.
My own journey began with the Peace Corps, where I learned the power of partnerships and grew to care deeply about African languages and cultures, history, and people. My first foray into Rotary International came when my wife’s younger brother died of a very preventable disease in northern Togo and we decided to help build and install a serology lab at the Yendube Children’s Hospital in northern Togo. When I presented a project to the Evanston Lighthouse Rotary Club in Evanston, IL, they eventually invited me to join the club. The Third Goal of the Peace Corps is to share what we’ve learned in Peace Corps Service with people in our communities. The Peace Corps – Rotary connections are growing every day, including “Partnering for Peace” where RPCVs leverage their experiences and skills to create strong partnerships. Rotary International also has a strong partnership with USAID to build wells in Ghana (and more?).
What began as a small project to organize a container of books to be distributed by EduPower grew as we connected with other partners. BFA put me in touch with Dr. David Bassiouni, a retired UNICEF Officer, who was working with UNESCO South Sudan to improve the library resources at South Sudanese universities. BFA has ongoing relationships with Thomson Reuters (law collections) and Merck Pharmaceuticals (medical books published by Elsevier) and we were able to obtain an entire container of new books for universities. In addition, BFA had a relationship with Mr. Garang Buk Buk (himself a veteran of the Carter Center team that is working to eradicate Guinea Worm), who had volunteered in the BFA Atlanta warehouse while working on his MPH at Emory University. His CASE program needed books for the northern region of the country. The Rotary Club of Juba was willing to be the international partner for a Rotary matching grant project and had a long list of Juba schools in need of books. The demand for books was now far beyond what one container could supply.
Success Through Dedicated Cooperation
The Rotary Club of Northfield agreed to take the lead and little by little gained support from fourteen other clubs, with Rotary District 5960 raising over $25,000. Good news came when this project was accepted for a subsidy from the US Department of Defense’s Humanitarian Program Fund (another BFA partnership), effectively bringing the number of containers from one to five and even transporting the containers 800 miles inland from the port in Mombasa, Kenya. The value of this project was significant, with over $1.7 million in books received. UNESCO assured the safe delivery of law and medical books to several universities while the other partners assured the storage and delivery of over 100,000 more books to schools and libraries.
The Rotary Club of Northfield (MN) received BFA’s Kilimanjaro Award for the most impactful partner organization of 2025. In fact, the project’s growth and success really came down to the many partners who worked together to make it happen. I was able to draw on my own formative experiences as a young Peace Corps Volunteer on a USAID project on the other side of the continent forty years before to help put the pieces of the puzzle together. Each of the partners has their own origin story, strengths and resilience to positively impact the lives of people they may never meet.
When I was in the Peace Corps, Rotary International was in the formative stages of launching the Global Polio Eradication Initiative- GPEI. There were four partners in 1988: the World Health Organization (WHO), UNICEF, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and Rotary. In 1988, there were over 350,000 cases of polio in 125 countries across the planet. Then in 2024, there were less than 100 cases of wild polio in only two countries: Pakistan and Afghanistan. Finally in 2008, seeing the success and challenges of the GPEI, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation pledged to match every dollar raised by Rotarians 2 to 1 and the results have been powerful. More recently, Gavi, the Vaccine Alliance has joined the effort. The eradication of polio is within reach, just as small pox was eradicated almost half a century ago. Now, the core partners are also being undermined as the USA considers withdrawing support from the WHO and other UN agencies. All that has been accomplished over the past 37 years is in jeopardy as key partnerships are weakened.
The USAID officer who managed our agricultural project in the 1980s was an RPCV as was the Animal Scientist who worked with Togolese veterinarians and farmers. The world of international development is full of partnerships and USAID is the organization that coordinates, orchestrates, and funds much of the good work being done. They are good at what they do and RPCVs play an important role within the agency. Partnerships make everyone stronger and undermining key partners makes everyone weaker. That cannot be the goal of good policy. Scrutiny and improvement are good things. Demolition is not. It is always easier to destroy an institution than to improve it. No organization is an island and Peace Corps and USAID are sources of strength in the world and need to be improved and reinforced, not undermined.
