Lifestyle/Culture
An Audiobooks App will tell Unheard African Stories By Rochelle Beighton and Rachel Wood, CNN
AFRICAN COUNTRIES HAVE A LONGSTANDING tradition of oral storytelling, used to entertain and educate younger generations about culture and history. Now, tech entrepreneur Herman Chinery-Hesse, known for establishing SOFTtribe (softtribe.com), Ghana's largest software company, wants to to keep this tradition alive through a new audiobooks app. Afrikan Echoes is due to launch in March, featuring up to 50 original and unpublished African works that have been translated into multiple African languages, including Yoruba, Amharic and Swahili. The Ghanaian innovator says his platform will allow people from all walks of life to tell their untold tales on the international stage. African storytellers from across the continent will be able to pitch their stories to Afrikan Echoes by sending voice notes in their native language. These pitches will be evaluated by ChineryHesse's creative team before being recorded in their studio. Available on Android, with each story costing $1 to download, the app will feature a variety of styles, from action and autobiographies to history and romance. "In today's world, the oral tradition can be translated into electronic audio," Chinery-Hesse tells CNN. "So suddenly, we have Africa's oral tradition on steroids, which is what we are trying to achieve here." "We would like a situation where non-Africans can listen to African stories told by Africans, in an
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African way," he adds.
Reaching rural areas According to data released by the World Bank, around 65% of adults in sub-Saharan African are literate, compared to over 84% globally. ChineryHesse 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. DAWN
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