Many of you have written to me, needing help especially with the books and course material. I dont yet have the final solution for all the Africa countries, and with time i believe that is the plan for CIPs on a Global scale.
I am here to however give you all an update on how far things have come for Africa. The pilot project is Books for Africa, as the name suggests we know where this conversation is headed to. There is a pilot to be run under stewardship of Andre Coetzee who is the Managing Director, CIPS Africa.
I will summarize the pilot project for you to better understand having gotten a few emails between myself and CIPS Africa office in South Africa, this is it:
We intend to roll out the project into our key countries, certainly to Kenya and Nigeria – i certainly appreciate that Nigeria is part of that pilot.
The aim of the project is to makes books more accessible – and more affordable – to our students. We have chosen our largest study centres in each key country who will have a stock of our books on their premises (typically the most popular titles). The students in that country can then make an arrangement to get the book from the study centre which should be a quicker option than waiting for delivery from the UK. Also the cost of the book will be ex study centre – so the student will not have to pay for international delivery costs – only for in-country costs, if any. Our concern as CIPS Africa, is to ensure that no additional costs are imposed by our ‘distributors’ on the CIPS student for the course books, so we want to control the exit (sales) price and will be paying the cost of delivering to the study centre from South Africa. We will also run surveys with students to ensure the correct price has been charged. We chose to collaborate only with those organisations that support and uphold the CIPS values.
This is an update that you can share with your friends who are facing the dilemma of accessing books as Africa students. I appreciate that they know and accept there is a problem. I also appreciate that they are looking for solutions and testing things out with a pilot, keeping in mind that things operate differently from one African country to another it is not easy to have just one solution for all economies. With the pilot they will definitely get the feedback they need to help streamline the processes of accessing books for Africa students.
Lets have a chat about this? Drop me a line