Thinking of building a career in publishing? Then a broad grin should be covering your face right now because The Lagos Action Plan is creating footpaths for you!!
At the Inaugural International Publishers Association Africa seminar in Lagos, history was made in the Publishing industry. The Lagos Action Plan dream was birthed by several members of the International Publishers Association Africa in partnership with the International Publishers Association.
This dream seeks to bring a new face to the publishing profession. According to Mr. Gbadepo Adedapo, the president of the Nigerian Publishers Association, statistics show that there are over 500 million book buyers all over Africa and therefore, there is a need to publicize and advocate the profitability of the publishing profession.
The Lagos Action Project is a plan to organize a series of seminars to advocate the business of publishing in order to attract investors and create new career opportunities for young Nigerians. After the International Publishers Africa Seminar series was established in 2018, an initial seminar was hosted in Lagos, Nigeria. This seminar brought publishers, policymakers and creative industry stakeholders to the table to decide the future of publishing.
The inaugural seminar, held under the theme of “Publishing for Sustainable Development: The Role of Publishers in Africa”, was a response to a need for a platform to discuss sectoral innovation and revitalization as well as develop new ideas and solutions. The event attracted 200 attendees from over 20 countries, making it the largest global forum on African publishing ever held. The key purpose of the seminar included:
- To promote purposeful action towards building African publishing markets.
- To aid fruitful dialogue and productive partnerships within the continent and the rest of the world.
- Based on the success of the 2018 event and generous support from partners, the International Publishers Association (IPA) has made the Africa Seminar Series an annual event to serve as a continent-wide, multi-sectoral platform for creative thinking, collaboration, and action to shape the future of African publishing.
The Lagos Action Plan is an attempt to collate a shared view of the opportunities and most pressing challenges facing African publishing. It aims to assist in building potential strategies and solutions.
Some of the ways by which its potentiality is showed is through the following programs:
- The African Publishing Innovation Challenge Fund with the support of Dubai Cares enables seminar action plans to rapidly be developed into quick impact pilot projects implemented in partnership with trusted local partners.-
- Action plan pilot programs funded through the newly created African Publishing Innovation Challenge Fund presents an opportunity to engage some of the brightest young minds, identify new leverage points for intervention, promote cross-sectoral collaboration and explore new approaches for industry transformation.
To show the importance of this project, The Lagos Action Plan was initiated by a committee of seasoned publishers who conducted extensive consultations involving publishers and members of the general public in 39 African countries.
Members of the public had no gender or professional segregation and thus included people from all works of life, from community leaders to business leaders to entrepreneurs, to students and academics, to women and youth associations, in fact, the list is endless. These go to show that the LAP is not an idea of novices but of seasoned professionals with the hope to reach out to the layman in the society.
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