By Anna Majavu
Setting up a small business in the creative arts with a useful social purpose is not easy, but it can be very rewarding, as a diverse and inclusive Gauteng publishing house has found. The seven-year-old Ethnikids specialist publishing house recently won R500,000 and business advice for a year in Momentum’s 2023 Big Success for Entrepreneur – Big Success Pitch competition.
Khumo Tapfumaneyi and Tina Akuoko founded Ethnikids in 2016 after they became mothers and could not find books in bookstores written in their mother tongues that featured characters who looked like their children. “That’s where we saw the gap in the market for a children’s bookstore where we could have more representation available,” Tapfumaneyi said.
“We started the children’s bookstore in 2016 to specialise in inclusive and diverse children’s literature. In 2020, when we couldn’t trade, we saw that we needed to pivot our business into something else to secure it and have other streams of income.” They then started a publishing house, sourcing many of the books from local publishers. “What differentiates our bookstore is that we also stock a lot of independent titles – those that are either self-published or made by very small publishers,” she said.
Some of their latest releases are ‘Zandi’s Song’, a book about Zandi the Mermaid, and an isiZulu pictionary, which is a picture dictionary. They market their books at pop-up book reading events for children at schools, libraries, malls, or parks. So far, most of their earnings have been ploughed back into the business to cover the costs of three permanent and three seasonal staff, warehousing, packaging, marketing, and other costs.
Tapfumaneyi said that with the R500,000 prize money, the business would be able to expand and create its own books, which it could distribute far more widely. Already, Ethnikids has a few partnerships lined up with corporate social responsibility funds to build libraries in rural and township areas, and to supply books to early childhood development centres.
Tapfumaneyi said the secret to winning the competition was first describing the problem – that only 2% of all books published in South Africa were in an African language, and that only 8% of all public schools have a library – and then saying how Ethnikids was fixing it, by sourcing and distributing inclusive children’s literature widely. For anyone wanting to set up their own small business in publishing, Tapfumaneyi has this advice: “As a continent, we have so many stories to tell and there is so much creative talent in South Africa. It is not an easy field, so be incredibly resilient. It is very difficult to be seen and to get the support that we require, so when corporates support us as Momentum has done, it makes a world of difference.”
Momentum head of brand marketing Charlotte Nsubuga-Mukasa said the company’s role was “to enable the success of entrepreneurs to continue to play the pivotal role in the country’s economy”. “We found Khumo’s business to be bold, ingenious, and through her online bookstore she is enabling the success of the future generations”.
(This article was first published by Vutivi Business News on 13 July 2023).
