The Cadbury Read to Succeed initiative aims to improve children’s literacy across Africa.

To achieve this, Cadbury rolled out a campaign, ‘In Our Own Words’, to create a library of culturally relevant stories which African children can relate to, to encourage them to read more.

Two thirds of African parents say Africa is not truthfully represented in their children’s books. We at Cadbury Dairy Milk want to change this. We want to ignite a love for reading in children by making contemporary African story books they can relate to.

The campaign covers Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique and Mauritius which are the ROA markets for Cadbury.

The Read to Succeed initiative aims to ignite a love for reading among children in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Zambia, Mozambique and Mauritius by creating a library of culturally relevant stories for children.

To achieve this Cadbury Dairy Milk hopes to inspire more generosity in the world by waking people up to the power of their generosity and inspire them to get involved in creating a library of 150 home grown stories available to children across Sub-Saharan Africa.

From the 287 submissions received from contributors, the publisher, Sisi Afrika, selected 30 stories which met among other guidelines: originality, age appropriateness, culturally relevance and accuracy as well as child-friendly language.

The books are made for children under the age of ten years and have been categorized into 3 reader levels: 5 years and below, 6 – 8 years and 9 – 10 years.

Our official publishing partner is Sisi Afrika. We are also working closely with the Kenya Copyright Board (KECOBO) and the Betting Control and Licensing Board (BCLB).

The authors whose stories were published were each compensated Kshs.20,000 which was determined by the Kenya Copyright Board (KECOBO)

The Read to Succeed initiative is a generosity campaign. We hope to make available to our children culturally relevant books that they can identify with and relate to. This campaign is not intended or designed to generate for us any commercial benefits.

The books are currently available on the Cadbury Dairy Milk ‘In Our Own Words’ digital library and accessible to anyone who would like to download a story. Over the next three years, the books will be printed and distributed as story books to reach as many children as possible.

We are currently rolling out the second phase of this initiative by re-engaging the authors of the published books to provide sequels to the stories and calling out to the public to make more submissions and help us create more books to add onto our digital library.
The goal is to create 150 home grown stories available to children across Sub-Saharan Africa.
We are also working with our partners to have the books printed and distributed to reach as many children as we can.