About Kashfi’s Children
We take stories from countries with rich storytelling traditions to encourage flexible thinking in order to help children tackle the challenges in their lives.
Stories without borders
Our books hitch a ride with camel libraries to remote villages in Pakistan, travel by bicycle in Afghanistan, and are handed out by a network of volunteers, in countries where children are marginalised, where they face adversity, and where they often have little or no access to education.
Our projects
We gift books to small local non-profits and initiatives which have a proven track record, and which we are sure are committed to fostering education, equality, understanding and tolerance.
Our partners
Our sister operation, US-based Hoopoe Books has distributed over 5 million storybooks around the world, in the past two decades.
Our sponsors
We are a non-profit of volunteers, which is reliant on the generosity of others. When you donate, you help us place books into children’s hands. We promise to use your donations wisely, so as to invest in the future of children all over the world.
Who we are
Kashfi’s Children was founded by Safia Shah, the youngest daughter of Kashfi Shah and the Afghan writer and philosopher Idries Shah. During his lifetime Shah worked with renowned American psychologist Robert Ornstein, using stories to encourage critical thinking. Decades later, Safia continues to work closely with US-based Hoopoe Books to put beautifully illustrated storybooks into the hands of children in need. Safia suspects that she has inherited her mother Kashfi’s tendency to snatch food from her own children’s mouths in order to hand it to children less-well fed than her own. A trait, which has earned Safia the title Madame Biscuit (Mrs Biscuit) among the street children of Casablanca, where she and her family used to live.
How we work
We find small local projects, which are working to change children’s lives through education, and we offer them free books. We print locally so as to pay into the local economy and we fundraise in order to make our projects possible.
