Maxwell Wahome, Group Managing Director for Longhorn Publishers PLC, shares his assessment of the sector in Kenya and East Africa, and presents Longhorn, a Pan-African publishing house and content developer.

"Longhorn is a content developer. We identify various learning gaps in the market and develop content that will suit our market. For a very long time, our market has been the educational market, primary, secondary, and tertiary schools. Our area of focus over the last few years has been the general reading and non-academic content market. We are in eight African countries including Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda, Zambia, Malawi, Cameroon, and Senegal. Over the last one or two years, in our key area of developing content for the textbook market, we have seen a lot of government involvement. The impact has been so big that we are seeing quite a number of countries reviewing their curriculums, of course being driven by some of the global needs trying to focus towards the UN sustainable development goals of providing quality education. We are seeing a lot of countries, both Kenya and our neighbors, changing their curriculum. The impact of that is almost a complete overhaul of the content that we have developed for so many years that is available in textbooks in the educational space. But that has given us a huge opportunity to enter into new markets that we did not previously have a chance to enter, specifically the francophone market that was mainly dominated by French publishers or French speaking publishers. That is now an area of entry to grow our current presence in the anglophone space. Other than government, which will continue to have a huge impact in terms of our policy setting, we see digital transformation as another key area. It is a disruption in our business in a good way and a bad way. We are now creating a whole new market, totally blue ocean, that can now consume content that they would not consume before. When you wake up in the morning, the first thing that you do is look at your phone before you even say good morning to your spouse. Content has to be available on your mobile platform. Those are the channels that we are starting to look at. Looking at our business and some of our existing value chain processes and seeing the content, we had been focusing on textbooks and school age learners, but what about us? I consume content on YouTube daily. Why can’t I have content developed locally for the African market? That has immense opportunities for growth and it is scalable. Those are the key areas that we are looking at that are both disrupting and enabling our business at the moment", says Maxwell Wahome.

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