Keegan Kautzky watched his friend William read an entire economics textbook four times in two weeks.

He saw entire classes sharing one textbook, assigning each student to use it one hour a week.

He saw schools with 200 students meeting under trees because there was no shelter.

After spending a summer in Malawi, a country in southeastern Africa, Kautzky, senior in political science, returned to Iowa State with a passion to impact education in developing African countries. He is the co-founder of Pages of Promise, a movement on campus to collect textbooks and educational materials for universities and secondary schools in 22 African countries.

“One book from every [ISU] student could rebuild an entire [African] college five times over,” Kautzky said.

Kautzky and co-founder Kevin Geiken, senior in performing arts, plan to target courses that will use new books next year. Blue “Pages of Promise” bins will be located around campus during dead week, finals and the first week of summer for donations.

“Rather than getting five or 10 bucks back for used books, we can send them to people who will appreciate them,” Geiken said. “[Countries in Africa] need textbooks, and we have them. We can combine the two problems and create a solution for everybody.”

Kautzky and Geiken have been recruiting a larger network, using publishing companies, faculty groups and high schools. Their efforts, along with a few other volunteers, have already gathered approximately $8,000 worth of books.

Once books are collected at Iowa State, a nonprofit organization in St. Paul, Minn., will ship the books to Africa.

Deb McDonald, assistant director of Books for Africa, said the cost of shipping the books to Africa is covered if every third person donates one dollar.

“It’s hard for us to understand that they have no access to information in these rural areas,” McDonald said. “All students learn by memory and by writing in the sand.”

Mohamed Camara, graduate student in agricultural education and studies, is a native of Guinea, a country in western Africa. He agreed education is difficult in Africa.

“The kids are very smart, but textbooks and computers are not available,” Camara said. “I have traveled to 16 countries in west Africa, and that is the common denominator.”

His native country is French-speaking; the French burned libraries when Guinea took its independence from France in 1978.

“Textbooks are still unavailable, and they cost too much,” Camara said. “You have to be among the best students to go to school.”

Camara said it is not an option to be lazy when he has the opportunity to learn at Iowa State. He sometimes works in his office until 2 a.m.

“As soon as I finish my education, I am out of here to go help,” he said.

When Kautzky was in Malawi, he also saw Africans with little opportunity for a good education. Malawi is home to 12 million people, a population that is approximately four times the size of Iowa’s. Kautzky said only 0.3 percent of the Malawi people attend college.

“We have more people at Iowa State in one year than they have college graduates in the entire country,” he said.

Kautzky said many universities in Africa do not have computers or books, two computers are available for every ISU student.

“It’s a sad situation there, and we’re wasteful here,” Kautzky said. “There is no such thing as a public library in these countries.”

Geiken said he hopes students will look at this opportunity from a global perspective to help African students.

“It would be great to get one book from every student who has ever complained that books cost too much or that the Internet is too slow, or that there’s not a computer available in the lab,” Geiken said.

He said they hope to make Pages of Promise a permanent movement at Iowa State.