Step into the McMillan Memorial Library in Nairobi and you encounter bookshelves and a metaphor for Africa’s greatest missed opportunity. For over 90 years, this landmark has stood as a symbol of knowledge in Kenya’s capital, yet it also suggests the far greater possibilities that Africa’s publishing and literary economy still holds in reserve.
According to UNESCO’s 2025 report, Africa’s publishing sector could swell into an $18.5 billion powerhouse, more than double its $7 billion valuation in 2023. Still, despite housing the world’s youngest and most tech-savvy population, Africa commands just 5.4% of the $129 billion global book market. This is not merely an economic gap; it is a cultural and intellectual deficit, one that shapes Africa’s self-determination, literacy, and position in the global knowledge economy.
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The constraints facing Africa’s publishing industry are deeply historical. Colonial rule left nations dependent on imported texts and foreign publishing standards. Post-independence, governments prioritised infrastructure and industrialisation over education and culture, reducing books to luxury items rather than essential tools of learning. Today, UNESCO highlights weak policies, absent tax incentives, and over-reliance on imports as the sector’s largest bottlenecks.
The African Union has focused heavily on industrialisation and digital growth. Yet in contrast to energy, telecoms, and agriculture, book policy remains fragmented. This vacuum has left African authors lauded abroad but barely read at home; another example of how the continent continues to export raw cultural wealth without building industries strong enough to sustain it locally.
The Missed Infrastructure of Knowledge?
UNESCO’s message is blunt: robust policies, modern libraries, and digital integration could transform the sector. Africa’s 8,000 public libraries, largely underfunded and understocked, represent untapped gateways to literacy and cultural mobility. Kenya’s restoration of the McMillan Library, driven by Book Bunk and local authorities, demonstrates what is possible when policy, community, and capital converge.
Elsewhere, initiatives like South Africa’s AkooBooks and Ghana’s e-book distributors point to a digital awakening, though progress remains uneven. The stakes are high: an integrated African book market could strengthen literacy, nurture intra-African circulation, and ensure African stories are first valued on African soil, not solely on Western shelves. Without this, the continent risks perpetuating a cycle where its culture is worth more abroad than at home.
Africa’s demographic advantage is undeniable: 70% of sub-Saharan Africans are under 30. This rising generation craves stories that reflect its realities and tools that expand its opportunities. The explosion of literary festivals—more than 270 across the continent each year—alongside the growing appetite for e-books and audiobooks, reflects a market eager for its own narratives.
One of Africa’s greatest cultural strength lies in its 2,000 languages, yet it is also its biggest publishing challenge. Here, artificial intelligence could play a game-changing role, enabling affordable translation into local dialects. But as UNESCO’s Ernesto Ottone Ramírez cautions, this technological shift must empower African creators rather than exploit them. Managed wisely, AI could democratise access, accelerate literacy, and amplify the reach of African storytelling.
Africa’s publishing sector is about more than commerce. It is about sovereignty, identity, and cultural permanence. Books—and the ecosystems that sustain them—are not secondary to Africa’s development story. They are infrastructure as vital as roads or broadband.
If African nations align policy, investment, and innovation, the projected $18.5 billion opportunity will not remain a distant statistic. It will be the foundation of a new continental economy: one where Africa asserts its voice, circulates its knowledge, and defines its place in the global order not as a supplier of raw material, but as a producer of ideas, literature, and wisdom.
