TOM BURGIS: Politically and economically Africa’s becoming more confident and more assertive as turmoil of recent decades falls away, to some extent, as the commodity boom draws global business attention to Africa. At the same time it’s starting to demonstrate that it can produce home-grown post-independence companies that can rival anything else in the world, and their leaders and their political counterparts are all now being taken far more seriously. We have tremendous access to business here, because they know that through the FT they can reach the kind of global investor audience they want to. When the commodity focus starts to turn we’ll see whether Africa has, for the first time, developed an economy that isn’t dependent on what’s in the ground, and that’s, historically speaking, and in terms of these enormous businesses, that is a critical moment.

FATHIMA DADA: About 10 years ago, some Millennium Development Goals were set for Africa, and one of them was to achieve universal primary education. And many African countries have gone a very long way towards achieving that. We now operate in 11 African countries, including South Africa, but we now have fairly substantial businesses in Botswana, in Namibia, right up to Kenya. We also work in Portuguese language territories, like Mozambique, where we’ve been extremely successful recently. In fact, last year in Mozambique we sold 1.5 million books. We borrowed some teacher training programmes from the US, a particular one that was developed in California, called SIOP (CHECK), and we adapted that to local needs. It’s very specific in that it addresses the needs of learners who are learning in a language that’s not their mother tongue, which is a particular problem in Africa, and I think has been a major reason why African countries haven’t performed well in international educational benchmark tests in literacy and numeracy.

MARY CLARE TOMES: The Angolan project is about working in the national languages, and all our research shows that learning in mother tongue is definitely the most successful way of learning.

RUBEN CRASTO: I was in this town, M’Banza, Congo and the people were just amazed with all the materials, because it was the first time that they saw books written in their own language.

MARY CLARE TOMES: All the local languages were disappearing, Portuguese was taking over, and we have been working with the Ministry now for three years on resurrecting eight of the languages. Here’s one, Umbundu. And we’ve development tools, at the moment we’re up to class three, and we have readers, teacher’s guides, posters, everything that the teacher needs to teach these local languages.

RUBEN CRASTO: The Kongo is a very important language, because it’s the language that they spoke in the Kingdom of Kongo, and the Kingdom of Kongo encompasses the north of Angola, but also a great part of the DRC, and other parts of other countries, neighbouring countries.

MARY CLARE TOMES: We’ve been trialling in a 120 schools so far, and next year we see the roll-out in to 40,000 schools.

FATHIMA DADA: Africa is short of teachers by about 4 million, and of the millions of teachers that we do have, many, many of them are severely under-qualified. So we’re hoping with our teacher training developments that we’ll be able to address that.

Prof. MARY METCALFE: The Literacy Incubator provides research opportunities, learning opportunities for serving teachers to improve their ability to teach reading, various literacies. And that’s important, because if we don’t improve levels of literacy we won’t deal with the economic challenges of this country, the educational challenges, the social challenges or the political challenges.

FATHIMA DADA: The One Africa project is a project where we analyse several countries’ curriculums and come up with a core curriculum, and we’ve developed literacy and numeracy product which is state of the art, and which will go in to between 12 and 18 countries over the next five years.

ALISON LOWRY: Penguin is one of the biggest of the general publishers in South Africa. We’ve been talking to Heinemann and looking at how we can collaborate with them as partners, and Heinemann are now very much educational publishers, we are general trade publishers, so what we are planning to do is look at reproducing quite a number of the Heinemann African Writers’ series in new livery, in Penguin trade editions, while taking nothing away from the educational editions that are still very widely used in schools. One of the things that we’re looking at is trying to reflect who our customer is going to be in five or ten years time, so what we are trying to do now is publish for a more diverse market, and looking to recruit more African writing and writers for our list.

MOKY MOKURA: I got a little bit fed up of going in to bookshops and just seeing European, Western American business leaders and it just seemed as if there weren’t any African entrepreneurs. And I knew that wasn’t the case. So this is a book about stories, stories of people and how they made it, and I’m hoping the book will create African heroes, because I think we need them. We always seem to be looking elsewhere for that, and I think the tide is changing, I think things are changing, I think people now want to know which Africans are doing well.

ALISON LOWRY: We are trying to make connections, a big network of academics, writing groups, various organisations across Africa, probably starting with sub-Saharan Africa, but not - certainly not counting out further afield, and looking to publish those new voices in our market rather than have them go overseas and look for an international market that way.

Dr. BELINDA HUNTLEY: Now the history of the mathematics course at WITS has been very textbook based. All our assessments have been paper based, so I realised that if we were going to progress we will need to move in to the technological era.

DEAN ERASMUS: We demo’ed MyMathLab about three weeks ago, and the fact that some students can work faster and others can go to more exercises was a real - real big selling point for these lecturers, without them having to grade all the marks.

STUDENT: I like that I can not carry around a big hefty book.

STUDENT: You can just check the ebook and see where we are going from, or what could I do to sort this problem.

STUDENT: Normally, I don’t test myself when I study, so it’s a nice way to see how good you are, and what you need to work on more.

Prof. TAWANA KUPE: It puts the student in the driving seat in the learning/teaching process. What they do in a place like this is that they get resources which they can interact with, generate knowledge themselves, and be able to select knowledge. That actually stimulates their minds, they become much more creative and innovative.

FATHIMA DADA: We have a big range of digital products that we’re developing for our South African schools business. We have a major new series we will be launching in its entirety, it will cover 10 years of schooling, we will be launching it next year at the Cape Town Book Fair. And we have a set of exam preparation materials, so we have exam bank CD roms, we call them, they’re called the Focus Exam Bank CD roms, and what they do is they offer teachers a tool whereby they have - they are able to select carefully put together items for testing and assessment. Towards the end of last year we launched something called the Maskew Miller Longman Foundation. We go in to local communities, very poor, disadvantaged communities.

JANE BURSEY: It is a programme doing training in ECD, in foundation stage literacy and numeracy, in ICT skills, and also involving children, learners from the community, and giving them digital arts skills as well.

NGAKA KEKANA: For example, the early child would be taken through a process of how to manage their classes, how to organise their classes, and the principles and officials learnt how to use the IT in accessing information and delivering curriculum. We had people come in from other regions, and they were so interested that it should come and cover all the areas of Limpopo.

FATHIMA DADA: And based on all of this we will be making recommendations to provincial governments, particularly Education Ministries, in terms of what we think it takes for a school to develop best practice. So we’re very excited about the MML Foundation. We also feel, you know, after 10 good years of drawing our profits from these communities it’s also time to put something back.