Kenya

Pearson has become the latest blue-chip company to increase its venture investments, committing $50m to education start-ups in Africa and Asia.

The world's largest education company by revenues, which owns the Financial Times, is expanding a fund it set up in 2012 with $15m to invest in companies focused on improving low-cost private education.

Many media and telecoms groups, including Sky, the pay-television company, and publisher Reed Elsevier, are opting for venture investments in an attempt to increase innovation and growth. Bertelsmann, the family-owned German media group, has committed at least $100m to education start-ups.

Ebook and literacy nonprofit Worldreader is partnering with the UN Refugee Agency on a pilot program to give Kindle Paperwhites to 2,300 secondary school students in African refugee camps.

We’ve written a few times in the past about Worldreader, the Seattle-based nonprofit that provides Amazon Kindle devices and e-books to schoolchildren in Uganda, Ghana, Kenya and Tanzania. And now, according to an item posted earlier this week on a news site known as GhanaWeb, DHL Express and Worldreader have announced a mutually-benficial partnership. “Through the partnership,” according [...]

Kenya’s very first e-bookstore, eKitabu, officially launched about 10 weeks ago, according to an article on the website of a Kenyan media group. And this is interesting: According to a post on the eKitabu blog, the company introduced itself to Kenya’s reading public at a brick-and-mortar bookstore, Text Book Centre. Apparently e-book kiosks have since been installed [...]

We are pleased to announce the first free ebook release supported by a successful campaign on the Unglue.it crowdfunding platform, which launched in May 2012.  It may be downloaded from Unglue.it at https://unglue.it/work/81834/ .  Soon you will also be able to download it from your favorite ebook store, and library ebook collections.

Open Book Publishers (Cambridge, UK) has released a revised, digital edition of Ruth Finnegan's classic work of scholarship, Oral Literature in Africa, free for all to read and share under a Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license.

 Years ago, David Risher, a former Amazon executive, came up with the unlikely plan of distributing Kindles to children in the developing world to help increase literacy.

Why take a fragile piece of technology that requires charging and Internet connections to places where infrastructure can be sparse, especially when there’s an inexpensive, low-tech alternative in print books?

But Mr. Risher has gradually found acceptance for the nonprofit he founded to take e-books to Africa, Worldreader.