Give your unwanted pens a new home! Advertising Feature: Staples.

G OING back to school with new stationery seems to be compulsory for kids - not least because most love stationery and want to stand out from the crowd.

The list can often seem endless - fr om a new pencil case to pens, highlighters, a stapler, a calculator, ruler, notebooks, paper, files and so on. And then there's different sizes, styles and colours to choose from.

But have you ever wondered, when you are buying new pens and a pencil case for your children, what happens to all those perfectly good, unwanted ones? For most families they simply end up in a cupboard or drawer, taking up valuable space or, even worse, they're thrown away.

But now Staples has come up with a solution. It has joined forces with the charity READ International to launch Back to School Swapsies, a major initiative that aims to ship the UK's unwanted pencil cases and pens -as long as they're in working order - to schoolchildren in Tanzania and Uganda.

All you have to do is drop the pens and pencil cases off at your local Staples store, and Staples will give you a pounds 1 voucher to spend on anything from a scientific calculator to that all-importanmaths set. READ International will then collect, sort and ship the stationery to Africa.

This latest initiative builds on the work of the charity, which has a 500strong student volunteer network, responsible for redistributing disused text books from the UK to Africa. Since its launch in 2003 it has shipped nearly half a million books.

Commenting on the initiative, READ International director Rob Wilson said: "This is a fantastic idea which we hope will capture the imagination of young people and get them thinking about recycling, their own environment and helping others.

"I have seen first-hand the huge demand for basic stationery in East African schools and know that hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren in Tanzania and Uganda will benefit from this initiative."

Staples has also agreed to donate new pens and pencil cases to the charity. They will be shipped to Africa later this year, together with the latest batch of text books. Schoolchildren in Tanzania and Uganda follow a syllabus almost identical to the UK, but as one of the poorest regions in the world, teachers often lack the resources needed to teach.

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HELPING HAND: READ International director Rob Wilson discovers for himself how the charity's work is helping children in Tanzania