The more we can do to share information and stories, the better off every will be. So this is a fantastic story – so great to hear about better ways we can make this kind of information more freely available to everyone!
We are giving you an excerpt from this article below; and you can read the whole thing here.
“Afrikan Echoes is due to launch in March, featuring up to 50 original and unpublished African works that have been translated into multiple African languages, including Yoruba, Amharic and Swahili.”
“According to data released by the World Bank, around 65% of adults in sub-Saharan Africa are literate, compared to over 84% globally. Chinery-Hesse believes Afrikan Echoes will allow Africans who cannot read the opportunity to consume stories from the continent.
His vision is that one day, “if you drive into an African village, you’ll be able to find everyone sitting at the back of the chief’s house, speaker on, with an audiobook playing about some event in another African village, in another African country, and they’re all listening attentively,” he says.
Reaching customers living in rural areas without access to the internet or mobile data is one of Afrikan Echoes’ biggest challenges. According to International Telecommunication Union estimates, in 2019 only 28% of Africans used the internet.
That’s why Chinery-Hesse is creating a model that allows people to share audiobooks while offline. He says this could work through an in-app button which will allow some people to bulk buy audiobooks and then distribute them to others via Bluetooth.
Afrikan Echoes also uses SMS texts to alert registered customers to the latest audiobook releases.
Funded by SOFTtribe, Afrikan Echoes currently runs out of Chinery-Hesse’s home in Freetown, Sierra Leone, and is stocked with recording equipment that is used to record up to five stories a week.
Chinery-Hesse says the startup has spent under $100,000 to launch and that he purposefully avoided fundraising to ensure the company remained entirely African-owned.””
What a cool story! And this could be a model for us in sharing other types of stories and information. You can read all of this article here.