On February 28, Eramet announced the launch of “Lire pour l’avenir” (Read for the future), an educational project in Gabon carried out in partnership with the French association Bibliothèques Sans Frontières (Libraries Without Borders) and the Gabonese Ministry of Education.
Thanks to this initiative, 6,500 students from six high schools located around the Transgabonese railroad line, operated by Setrag, will benefit from new physical and digital libraries. Each high school will receive 250 books and several thousand dematerialized educational contents, accessible offline. The project also includes the distribution of 4,000 memory cards for future Baccalauréat candidates, ready to be inserted into smartphones to access content and facilitate studying, even without an Internet connection.
From left to right: Edouard Delbendé, Vice-President of Bibliothèques Sans Frontières; Virginie de Chassey, Director of Sustainable Development and Corporate Engagement at Eramet; Laurent Mouity Mabika, General Secretary of the Ministry of Education, representing the Minister.
To help educational staff get to grips with these new tools, training courses have also been organized, as Cédric Irakoze, Regional Education Manager for Central and West Africa at Bibliothèques Sans Frontières, explains: “Bibliothèques Sans Frontières’ support for teachers is essential, which is why I have myself carried out several missions to raise awareness of how to manage the educational content we make available to pupils. The books themselves have been selected by Gabon’s National Pedagogical Institute to reflect the specific characteristics of the country and its wider region, while leaving room for knowledge of global issues.”
This project is part of the “Eramet Beyond for Contributive Impacts” program financed by Eramet in the countries where the Group operates. Complementing the CSR actions of Eramet subsidiaries, “Eramet Beyond” aims to contribute to projects that generate economic activities independent of those directly linked to Eramet sites, to empower local populations and foster their socio-economic development. “Eramet Beyond” is also one of the objectives of the Group’s new “Act for Positive Mining” CSR roadmap.
