IPA President Bodour Al Qasimi Stresses Opportunity in African Publishing
The IPA president has made trips to four African markets, meeting with publishing leaders on the challenge to learn from the pandemic’s lessons in rebuilding the continent’s book business.
International Publishers Association president Bodour Al Qasimi meets in Accra with Ghanaian publishers. Image: IPA
‘African Ownership, African Innovation, African Energy’
On the latest stop in her series of meetings with African publishers and associations, International Publishers Association (IPA) president Bodour Al Qasimi was in Accra to meet with publishers there and with members of the Ghanaian Publishers Association. One of her key messages in her travels is that the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic holds out a chance for African publishers to rebuild their sector for growth.
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Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi of the United Arab Emirates is the second woman and first Arab woman to be appointed president of the International Publishers Association since it was founded in 1896. Al Qasimi, who took over as IPA president for a two-year term on January 1, has been the Arab world’s unofficial publishing ambassador since she came on the international publishing scene in 2007, when she founded the Arabic-language children’s publishing house Kalimat. Since then, Kalimat has grown into a publishing group with a list of more than 400 titles published through five divisions, covering children’s books, books in translation, education, and comics.
Strategies
On both occasions, Al Qasimi presented the IPA’s 2021 vision to develop strategies to return global publishing to full strength and enable it to continue making its vital contribution to education, social development and knowledge economies.
Addressing KPA officials and Kenyan publishers, Al Qasimi said: “The pandemic exposed some important underlying issues in the publishing world, and its impact continues to reverberate. This is why we are assembling a cross-sectoral task force comprising publishers, authors, illustrators, distributors, wholesalers, printers, and like-minded others. We will engage all stakeholders across the value chain and draw up a road map to help the book industry to be more resilient and move onwards and upwards, to everyone’s benefit.”
Al Qasimi met local publishers and the leadership of IPA member the Kenya Publishers Association (KPA) as part of an IPA drive to boost the resilience and sustainability of publishing worldwide.
NAIROBI, 6th February, 2021 (WAM) International Publishers Association (IPA) President Bodour Al Qasimi has continued a tour of pandemic-hit publishing markets by visiting Kenya, whose national publishing industry is one of many reeling from the ravages of COVID-19 in 2020.
Al Qasimi met local publishers and the leadership of IPA member the Kenya Publishers Association (KPA) as part of an IPA drive to boost the resilience and sustainability of publishing worldwide.
Her arrival in Kenya follows a trip to Egypt in early January to.