As Learn Africa Plc, a learning resource business marks its 60th anniversary, the chairman, Chief Emeke Iwerebon has disclosed that the company would in the next six years focus on digital and technology to provide e-contents as it targets reaching to a larger population with contents at a very reduced price.
Learn Africa was established in 1961 as Longman Nigeria, a book publishing firm wholly owned by Longman Group UK Limited, now Pearson Education. On July 23, 1996, the shares of Longman Nigeria Plc were listed on the Nigerian Stock Exchange and 2008, Pearson Plc acquired 51percent controlling shareholding in Longman Nigeria Plc.
In 2011, however, Pearson Plc by mutual agreement decided to fully divest from Longman Nigeria Plc, leading to its rebranding as Learn Africa.
According to Iwerebon, the transition to Learn Africa came with challenges as new textbooks had to be developed, especially for Mathematics and English at the Secondary levels from JSS 1 to SS 3 to replace the hugely successful New General Mathematics and English Project, which are Pearson exclusives.
“Also, we no longer had the right to market the hugely popular Longman dictionaries. We were able to quickly publish new titles and secured the rights to new dictionaries and rigorously promoted them and today, these books, New Concept Mathematics, New Concept English, Learn Africa English Dictionary and many other titles are bestsellers in their product category,” the chairman said.
Iwerebon explained that the company is collaboration with partners to provide and develop e-content; disclosing that on the international level, it is developing what is called a consortium digital learning for Africa where close to 27 to 30million students are to be provided with contents.
“We hope we would be able to achieve that in collaboration with UNICEF, we are waiting for them to take the final decision, but it is in our interest to provide our contents at a very cheap amount so that it will be affordable to students in public schools, so that is our focus. E-Content is our focus, we are very confident in our position on that as we have been working and improving on developing our technology in the last 10years to achieve our aim during and after COVID-19,”
Also, Iwerebon disclosed that the company is working with Lagos state government to provide e-content to senior secondary students in both English, Maths, Physics, Chemistry and Biology while it has been awarded a job of providing contents to the Kaduna State e-library.
“We are going to start selling e-contents to some of the schools. Our own target is to see how we can get content to a larger population at a much more reduced price,” he said while he urged government to invest more in books, particularly for public school students.
Commenting on whether the introduction of e-contents/books would phase out paper books in the near future; the chairman of Learn Africa assured that e-books cannot phase out paper books. He added, saying, “we will always have paper books, because even in the developed countries; they still have paper books, it’s like ratio 60:40. “It’s more like 60percent paper and 40percent e-content.,” he said.
While he commended the current leadership of the Nigerian Copyrights Commission; he appealed to government to intensify efforts in the fight against piracy. “We rely on government to eradicate piracy,” he stressed.
