PerbiCubs Foundation

A child can be in school every day for five years and still not be able to read a story. That is not a worst case. Eighty-seven per cent of ten-year-olds in Sub-Saharan Africa cannot read and understand a simple passage. Most of them are in a classroom right now, being taught, by teachers who are trying. Somewhere along the way, being in school and being able to read well came apart — and no amount of enrolment puts them back together. What we built We started Perbi Cubs in Ghana in 2018 to close that gap, and we have been at it for eight years. A child on our programme gets: A library card of their own. More than 4,000 ebooks, African and international, matched to the level they actually read at rather than the class they happen to be sitting in. A comprehension quiz after every single book, so nobody has to take a child’s word for it. A weekly library period. A weekly assembly where the school reads out the names of the children who were the top readers for the week. A report to their parents every month. And a report card at the end of term showing exactly how far they moved. More than 19,000 children have read with Perbi Cubs and have passed over a million comprehension quizzes. We were an official partner of UNESCO Accra World Book Capital 2023. We are a Mastercard Foundation EdTech Fellow, supported by the Jacobs Foundation, and we work with Carnegie Mellon University on the science of reading engagement in Africa. Our efficacy is certified at Bronze level by the International Centre for EdTech Impact. The children we never reach Every one of those 19,000 children either came from a family that could pay the fee or were supported by donors. The child we never reach is sitting in the similar classroom. Similar teacher, similar timetable, similar ability. She just never gets a library card, and by the time anyone notices, she is eleven and behind in every subject at once, and it follows her the rest of her life. PerbiCubs Foundation exists for her. 60 for 60 On 8 September 2026, we celebrated the 60th Anniversary of International Literacy Day. To mark it, we are funding 6,000 Cubs through a full academic year of reading. $60 funds one Cub for the year. That is the smallest gift this page takes, and there is a reason for it. A scholarship is an academic year. We cannot put a child on the platform in September and take her off it in November, so we do not accept part of a scholarship and leave you to imagine the rest. Every gift here funds whole children. What the year does divide into is six blocks of two months — and that is how we report. Six times over the year you will hear what your Cub’s cohort read and how many quizzes they passed. You give once. You hear back six times. $180 funds three Cubs. $600 funds ten. And $3,600 funds sixty Cubs — one for each year of International Literacy Day. We are counting children, not dollars. The number that matters to us is how many Cubs are reading at the end of this, and that is the number we will report. If $60 is more than you can give today Give it with someone else. Our 60 for 60 Champions each take responsibility for sixty Cubs, and they raise it from their own circles — three people at $20, six at $10, a whole office between them. Gifts on a Champion’s page pool until they fund a whole scholarship, which is how a $20 gift still puts a real child in a real library. Ask us and we will point you at a Champion, or you can become one. Where your money goes, plainly Gifts on this page are made to Myriad USA, a US 501(c)(3), which grants them to PerbiCubs Foundation in Ghana. That is what makes your gift tax-deductible in the United States. Myriad charges a published fee on gifts it processes, and we would rather tell you that now than have you find it later. PerbiCubs Foundation operates under a shared services agreement with Perbi Cubs, the company that built and runs the platform. That is deliberate. It means your giving buys a child a place on something that already works, rather than paying to rebuild it. What you get back At the end of every two-month block we publish what that group of Cubs read and how many quizzes they passed — platform data, not anecdotes. If you fund sixty Cubs, you get a report on your sixty. Most giving asks you to trust that something happened. This one shows you. Give a Cub a year of reading so they are positioned to succeed. It is a gift that keeps giving.