The StreetLib Africa Project: Our Path to Nairobi

It’s been an amazing six months for StreetLib as we’ve expanded our global presence in 2019, but nowhere more so than with our StreetLib Africa Project.

Here’s a quick summary of how StreetLib accelerated its Africa ambitions in 2019, culminating this month in our new CEO Giacomo D’Angelo delivering a presentation on the Blockchain and the future of publishing at the invitation of the International Publishers Association Africa Regional Seminar in Nairobi, Kenya.

At which point you may be asking yourself, Blockchain? Africa? What is a digital books aggregator and publishing facilitator like StreetLib even doing in Africa, let alone talking about crypto-currencies?

Actually StreetLib has been in Africa longer than you might think. Our B2B global publishing industry blog The New Publishing Standard has been published from West Africa since 2017, and StreetLib and TNPS have long been carrying the flame for African publishing.

You may be wondering, “Are there enough people online in Africa to make it worthwhile?”

Well look at it this way. Africa has more people online than the United States. It has more people online than North America. It has more people online than Latin America. It even has more people online than the European Union.

There were 474 million Africans online as of March 2019 (compare less than 320 million in the USA), and every likelihood it will top a half billion by 2020 and 800 million by 2030.

Africa is one of global publishing’s most exciting prospects, and at StreetLib we’re doing our best to make sure authors and publishers both in Africa and beyond can benefit from the huge growth we foresee in the coming decade.

Here’s how StreetLib’s Project Africa evolved in the first half of 2019.

Wait, what? The world’s biggest book fair is in Egypt? As in Egypt in Africa?

In fact Africa is host to two of the world’s biggest book fairs. Algeria’s Algiers International Book Fair regularly attracts over 2 million visitors, and in a good year the Cairo International Book Fair in Egypt can double that.

Yeah, there are 54 countries in Africa. It’s a big place. Big enough to swallow the USA, China, Europe and a few other countries too.

By the way, one of those countries in the above graphic is the seventh largest country in the world by internet users, with 111 million people online. That’s more than any country in Europe, including Russia. By the end of 2019 Nigeria is likely to leapfrog Japan into sixth place.

As part of our 2019 global mission we proposed to launch a digital author & publisher portal for every country in the world by the end of the year. So portals for other parts of the world were launched alongside the African nations mentioned here.

We initially planned to have our Africa roll-out completed in time for the IPA Seminar in Nairobi in June, but accelerated our Africa programme in response to keen demand.

Unlike other western companies looking to engage with the African market, we did not just cherry-pick the bigger nations like Nigeria with 111 million people online, but even have publishing portals for tiny African nations like Sāo Tome & Principe, with just 58,000 people online.

It’s all very well being globally-minded and trying to support authors and publishers anywhere on the planet, but in many parts of the world the payment options we in the rich west take for granted are not available.

We all love Paypal, of course, but in some countries Paypal isn’t available at all, and in many others does not offer withdrawal options.

Mobile wallet solutions are helping make the world a fairer place when it comes to sending and receiving money, and it was only appropriate that, as part of our Path to Nairobi, we partner with some African mobile wallet solutions.

We chose Nigeria-based SureRemit, a Blockchain-enabled mobile wallet solution to receiving and sending money between countries.

2019 is the UNESCO Year of Indigenous Languages, and something we are fully pledged to support.

In Africa there are more indigenous languages than you could count in a month of Sundays, and so in April we partnered with Storyweaver, which produces and distributes children’s stories in indigenous languages around the world.

And best of all? The 5,000 titles we ingested into the StreetLib catalogue are available to read free, anywhere in the world.

StreetLib is about more than just distributing books. We are about the writing, publishing and reading experience. And that includes IP (intellectual property) rights.

So Paris-Casablanca-Abidjan based Nakiri, which specialises in IP rights management across the Francophone world, including Francophone Africa, was a natural next step for us on our path to Nairobi.

Paris-Casablanca-Abidjan? That’s France-Morocco-Côte d’Ivoire.

Much as we’d have liked to, we couldn’t be there in person for the Nigerian International Book Fair in Lagos, due to a prior commitment to make a presentation on the global book markets at the Thessaloniki International Book Fair in Greece.

So we did the next best thing and put together an online presentation showing the exciting potential of a hybrid print & digital Nigerian publishing industry.

You can check it out on the StreetLib Nigeria page.

YouScribe came next. YouScribe is the leading distributor of French-language content and has a very impressive presence in Francophone Africa, so we were delighted to be able to partner with YouScribe to extend our reach across the continent.

And then it was June. The IPA Seminar in Nairobi has arrived, and — special thanks to IPA Vice President Bodour Al Qasimi for this — StreetLib was able to participate in one of the most important publishing events of the decade.

We marked the event first by announcing our plans for a Pan-African Digital Library Hub to facilitate the exchange and distribution of digital books across the continent’s fast-growing network of digital libraries.

Then it was our CEO Giacomo D’Angelo’s turn to deliver the Blockchain presentation.

Not sure what the Blockchain is all about, or what it has to do with publishing? Check out Giacomo’s presentation here.

In fact we had four big StreetLib announcements at Nairobi , including that we had completed (six months ahead of schedule, our plan to provide an author & publishing portal to every country in the world)— you can find the in our Press Releases section here on Medium — but as this post is specifically about our StreetLib Project Africa we’ll mention just one more here.

In fact our new bi-weekly B2B newsletter, Publish Africa, is set to launch in just a few days, on June 27.

You can subscribe here.

That was just a small part of our activities over the first six months of 2019, and a small step on our mission to become the world’s first and only truly global, truly inclusive publishing industry company.

Thanks for being with us on this incredible journey.

StreetLib. Your global gateway aggregator for the 2020s.