230 million students around the world attend schools without electricity. Once at home, the reality is the same. When the sun sets, everything goes dark. No opportunity to study. No opportunity to dream of a brighter future. Rhoda Unyolo, 14, from Kanyera Village in Dedza District, Malawi knows these struggles all too well.
Rhoda enjoys spending her evenings at home with her parents and her three siblings. She likes to read and dream about her future. She especially enjoys reading her favourite book, ‘The Yawning, the Catching’. “I like the book because it says when you see a friend yawn, you should also yawn,” says Rhoda.Although she enjoys studying and reading, before the Light Library came to her school, she was struggling and had to repeat a semester.

Rhoda walks to school with her solar light in hand. Photo: BookAidInternational/SolarAid/Chris Gagnon.
By the dim light of a battery powered torch, Rhoda struggled with schoolwork. Her home was too dark to study in as most of the time there was little money to buy batteries. Rhoda’s mum, Judith Unyolo explained, “We don’t have electricity in this area. What we normally do is buy torch batteries. We even struggle to find money for the batteries.”
“We could buy a torch and battery cells for lighting at night, but the light was difficult. Sometimes it happened that we had no money for batteries and I stayed without studying,” Rhoda says.
Money in the household has been scarce and there have been times when there was not enough for food. “The challenge I experience is to feed the children each and every day. I do piecework in order to reduce hunger issues in our house, and so that we don’t face hunger in the future,” says Judith.