Meet the founder
How it all started
In 2014, 20-year-old Sam van Tol went on holiday to South Africa with his parents. There he saw for the first time what real poverty means. On the terrace of a restaurant, he wanted nothing more than to give away his food to the people without a roof over their heads. At schools in slums, he saw children in class without paper and pen. “How do you ever learn to read and write without practice?” he wondered.
Back home, Sam dived into researching the causes of extreme poverty. He found that illiteracy is a major driver of poverty and that 763 million people over the age of 15 are illiterate worldwide! In South Africa he had seen where this all starts: in schools where children don't have any writing materials!
This inspired him to develop erasable writing material and to get that writing material to children in Africa who otherwise cannot learn to read and write. Correctbook was born! With the help of this reusable writing material, children can practice endlessly. According to the statistics, if they learn to read and write as a result, their chances of a better future increase significantly.
Goal & strategy
Sam set the goal of providing as many as 1 million children in developing areas in Africa with reusable writing material in 2023. Correctbook does this by selling the rewritable material in Europe. In Europe, many people are looking for ways to work more sustainably. The reusable notebook offers a solution for this. Since the establishment of Correctbook, a fixed part of the turnover has been spent on donating the same writing materials to educational projects in Africa. Aimed at children who otherwise would not have had access to writing materials.
Would you like to know more about our mission and impact? Click on the button below to discover how many children we have already helped. Want to follow Sam's adventures? Click on the button below and read his diary.
Goed onderwijs voor iedereen
250 miljoen kinderen gaan helaas nog iedere dag naar school zonder pen en papier. Meer dan 750 miljoen mensen, wereldwijd boven de 15 jaar, zijn mede hierdoor analfabeet.
Ons doel? 1 miljoen kinderen helpen voor 2023
Wij hebben ons als ambitieus doel gesteld 1 miljoen kinderen in
ontwikkelingsgebieden een jaar lang
van schrijven te voorzien
voor 2023.