Expert Targets 1m African Students For Reading Culture Promotion

Director of International Exchanges and Associate Professor, University of Bath Management School, United Kingdom, Dr. Teslim Bukoye, has said more than one million students in universities, colleges and schools in Africa, Asia and the Middle East are being targeted in its global reading culture promotion.

Bukoye said he came up with an initiative christened ReadCycle Bath, with incentives to book readers, aimed at promoting reading culture across the world.
He said some Nigerian universities and polytechnics including Ahmadu Bello University (ABU), Zaria; University of Ilorin, Ilorin; University of Nigeria, Nsukka; and Federal University of Technology, Akure have been supplied with thousands of books through the project which started in the year 2022.
According to him, Afe Babalola University, Ado Ekiti; Leads City Trinity University, Ibadan and Federal Polytechnic, Offa and others have also benefitted.

The don in a statement made available to newsmen to mark the one-year anniversary of ReadCycle Bath said that incentives were put in some of the books to inspire the students to read.

The visiting professor at FUTA said, “We incentivise our reading culture by inserting a token of reward and words of encouragement in these books randomly, for lucky readers!

“ReadCycle Bath is motivated out of my strong desire to give back globally. ReadCycle Bath has a mission to inspire reading/studying and sharing books for the global good.”

“The idea is to create a global community that bridges the gap between those that have books to share and those that have not but are inspired to read. The goal is to reach a million students in seven years across universities, colleges and schools in Low and Middle Income Countries with Africa as our flagship project, then Asia and the Middle East.”