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“Right now what I need to think about is what would be possible, not all the reasons I can't make a change.” - John Wood

A former Microsoft executive has “built more libraries worldwide than Andrew Carnegie did,” Nicholas Kristof, a columnist for The New York Times, wrote in his column, on May 21. “School was possible because Room to Read paid for school fees, books, a uniform, school bag and bicycle, while also providing a broad range of counseling and training.”

John Wood (born 1964), a former Microsoft marketing executive (from 1991 to 1999), founded Room to Read, a global non-profit organization for improving literacy and gender equality in education in Asia and Africa, in 2000.

In 1998, when he was trekking on a vacation through the Himalayas, Wood visited a primary school with 450 children and only a handful of books. A year later, he returned to the school with 3,000 books, which he had collected from his friends and family members. Soon afterwards, he quit his job at Microsoft and launched Books for Nepal, an incubator project that would eventually lead to the founding of Room to Read.

Under the motto “World Change Starts with Educated Children,” Room to Read is helping primary school children develop literacy skills and the habit of reading, while helping girls complete secondary school. As of April, 2014, the organization had built more than 1,800 schools and 16,000 libraries, while having distributed about 13 million books to children in the developing world.

Room to Read has reached over 8.8 million children in ten countries in Asia and Africa: South Africa, Zambia, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, India, Nepal, Bangladesh, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. Wood’s 2006 memoir entitled Leaving Microsoft to Change the World: An Entrepreneur’s Odyssey to Educate the World’s Children tells us of why he left a promising job and launched a charity for children in the developing world.