Santa Clara professors build non-profit to benefit African libraries.

Byline: Sharon Noguchi

Jul. 18--Last month, after a gale blew off the tin roof of the village library in Bereba, Burkina Faso, the librarian picked up her cell phone.

Her plea for help almost immediately reached Michael Kevane, a Santa Clara University economics professor who founded the library. He approved the funds, and within three days the roof was replaced -- a critical move because the rainy season had started.

Linked by cell phones and e-mail, Kevane and his wife, SCU environmental studies professor Leslie Gray, fund and oversee libraries in seven West African villages. They're an example of how technology has revolutionized aid to the globe's most remote and impoverished areas.

Few countries are poorer than Burkina Faso, an agrarian nation with an annual per-capita gross domestic product of $1,300 (California's is about $42,700).

Burkina Faso's literacy rate is among the lowest in the world -- 26.6 percent, according to the U.S. State Department. Illiteracy is higher among women, Kevane said. In fact, few women over age 30 can read.

But the former French colony once known as the Republic of Upper Volta is on its way up. Signing on to ambitious goals of the United Nations Development Program, it is hoping to make all primary-school-age children literate by 2015. To do that, Burkina Faso is on a school-building binge.