Photos: Building Room to Read

John Wood, a former Microsoft employee, left the software giant in 1999 with a goal of building school libraries in Nepal. He is founder and CEO of Room to Read, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that taps wealthy donors across the globe to help build schools and libraries in developing countries. The organization has built 287 schools and several thousand libraries, and expanded to seven other countries in Asia and Africa.

Wood is shown here in November 2004 meeting children at a rural school in Bahar Dar, Ethiopia.