The African Storybook initiative aims to address the shortage of contextually appropriate books for early reading in the languages of Africa. Our vision is for all young African children to have enough enjoyable books to read in a familiar language to practise their reading skills and learn to love reading.
On the African Storybook website, www.africanstorybook.org , users can find, create, translate or adapt stories for early reading. They can download and copy the stories and/or illustrations without having to ask for permission or pay a fee. The stories can be read online or offline or printed from the website.
Our digital open licence publishing model is providing a growing number of stories in a growing number of languages without having to consider the size of the market for stories of a particular type in a particular language. In just of over two years, over 400 stories with nearly 2000 translations in over 60 languages have been generated and published, and the site grows each month.
To encourage and learn from use, the project is working with teachers, librarians, teacher educators and literacy development organisations in Eastern and Southern Africa.
The project is an initiative of Saide, a registered Non-Profit Organisation governed by a Trust and based in Johannesburg. The first four years of the project (2013 to 2016) are being funded by the UK based funder, Comic Relief.
