Jul 19, 2021
Today's episode features a conversation with Francois van Schalkwyk, founder, African Minds. The interview was conducted by Matthew Ismail, Editor in chief of the Charleston Briefings and Conference Director at the Charleston Conference.
Francois van Schalkwyk is a researcher who worked in the academic space with scholarly presses. He also assisted some non-government led businesses with publishing, dissemination, and distribution of their materials to people who were interested in reading them. The intersection of these two interests led him to found African minds in 2012. Based in Cape Town on the Southern tip of Africa, African Minds is a not-for-profit trust with a public benefits mission and, from a publishing perspective, underpinned by an open access approach. Francois says all their publications are available open access on their website. He says their focus is on topics relevant to the continent and its development and Knowledge produced by African academics. He also discusses the issues they face with publishing books in the many different languages spoken in Africa. Francois says he will continue the work to build their lists, gain a presence and he hopes to publish monographs from other parts of Africa and more scholarly works.