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Publishing in Africa

As part of our work supporting open licensing in early childhood literacy efforts in the developing world, NBA is engaged with publishers and other literacy stakeholders across Africa. NBA and its project partners have been discussing and developing an emerging vision to encourage the development of sustainable local publishing systems that incorporate judicious use of open licences and innovations arising from digital disruption to ensure meaningful access to and use of affordable, relevant, high-quality storybooks in mother-tongue languages to children in Africa, with the ultimate goal of improving literacy and educational outcomes for children and students. The creation of these systems to enhance early literacy in this way would also be a building block for wider, long-term growth of African publishing as a vibrant cultural sector, which we believe is an essential building block of any healthy democracy. 

The Early Literacy Resource Network portal aims to serve as an early literacy knowledge exchange to assist key stakeholders in the developing world. The website documents and disseminates information on all points of the early childhood publishing ecosystem – from policies and licenses to content creation, translation, production, distribution, and use. The goal is to assist in creating sustainable early literacy value networks that can solve the challenge of providing access to high-quality literacy materials in local languages in the global South.