I would like to thank the organisers of the Know How conference and the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development for generously enabling me to come to the Netherlands. I greet you on behalf of Trish Mbanga, my director, who was unable to travel to this important conference for personal reasons.

I am truly delighted to be here in Amsterdam because I believe that our mission as organisers of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair has much in common with the mission of the Know-How conference, namely to make women's information more accessible and visible to policy makers and others.

The ZIBF is the largest and most important gathering of book people in Africa south of the Sahara. It is held every year in August in Harare, Zimbabwe, a country strategically placed between South Africa and the rest of the continent. This location is one of the reasons for the ZIBF's premier position as both a meeting place and a market place for the book and information industry.

The ZIBF brings together the widest possible cross section of stake holders, practitioners and policy-makers, from marginalised communities right up to the highest levels of government, and from all parts of Africa and beyond.

Through the Zimbabwe International Book Fair, we are seeking to shape book and information policy in pursuit of a book reading, book using and book buying culture in Africa, and in the interests of a viable and sustainable publishing industry.

In African we grapple with problems generally associated with poverty. Despite all the economic difficulties that Africa has faced in the 1990s, the decade has proved a fertile ground for ZIBF to pursue its mission as a cultural and developmental catalyst. We at ZIBF start from the position that in Africa, perhaps more than any other continent, the books and literary culture has enormous potential for creativity and expansion. We are a continent full of would-be readers, young, hungry for knowledge,

exited about books and information.

In 1995 the African Publishers Network organised a forum at ZIBF on Library Acquisitions on African books - bringing publishers and librarians together in Africa. Difficult as it may seem to believe this was the first event of this kind in Africa. The forum illustrated how communications problems, geographical, institutional and economic barriers hamper the development of a book reading culture throughout the continent.

However, the book and information supply chain is weak in Africa. In most African countries the infrastructure of book shops, book distributors, booksellers and libraries is struggling to survive. Trade in books and information is poorly developed and fraught with obstacles. At the Zimbabwe International Book Fair we create opportunities for key players to forge and strengthen links. We provide a forum for debates and discussion, and at the end of the day we try to strengthen the links in the whole chain.

To give you a picture of the innovative richness and diversity of the people that you can expect to meet at the ZIBF, let me tell you about a few of the participants and events at the recent 1998 ZIBF, held earlier this month. This year we facilitated the support of publishers from Kenya, with the assistance of the Kenya Publishers Association. Among many distinguished visitors, we welcomed Ruth Makotsi a publishing consultant, Janet Njoroge and Serah Mwangi, both managing directors of their own independent publishing houses, Wangui wa Goro, Elinor Sisulu, Asenath Odaga, Pamela Kola, Professor Ali Mazrui, leading writers in their own fields in various African countries. UNIFEM used the book fair site to laungh their regional campaign on the elimination of violence against women.

A Ghanian Bookseller, Kwaku Ansa-Asare, ran a competition in Ghana where the first prize was a trip to the Book Fair. His company met all the costs of bringing the child to the book fair. We arranged for the child to meet with Zimbabwean and Kenyan children, and to participate in special events for young people. At the end of the book fair he told me that next year he would be sponsoring participation of at least one additonal Ghanian woman.

Several book development and reading associations from South Africa, West Africa and East Africa, met at the book fair and have set up an information network. They hope to build sufficient infrastructure and support to hold a special conference at the ZIBF in 1999.

Participants at the ZIBF enjoy unparalleled opportunities to network, to exchange experience, to discuss new ideas and, most important of all, to do business with each other. This year's Book Fair brought together more than 300 exhibitors representing more than 600 publishers from almost 50 countries, more than half of them African but also including New Zealand, Jamaica, Canada, India, and many European countries including of course the Netherlands. Together with thousands of trade and professional visitors, they took part in a week-long programme combining a trade fair with workshops, seminars and a keynote conference, or Indaba.

Any trade fair, anywhere in the world, sets out to present the latest and most exciting trends in its chosen sector. We at the ZIBF pride ourselves on being a Fair at the cutting edge of book development in Africa. We seek to be a catalyst, to stimulate, to challenge, to provoke.

We were therefore thrilled and honoured to be chosen by the Prince Claus Fund for Culture and Development as principal award winners for 1997. In his citation, the Prince said that the ZIBF

We are an international fair not just because of the number of countries who are represented among our exhibitors and visitors, but because we are open to the world. We are helping to establish, to consolidate and expand the space that the African publishing industry occupies within the international publishing industry, where it has every right to be.

The ZIBF is part of Africa's response to the globalisation of publishing and information dissemination and to the concentration of knowledge production itself in the developed West. Drawing on the language of Southern Africa's freedom movement, one might describe the ZIBF as a cultural weapon in the war against Africa's marginalisation and exclusion.Whatever words are used, the important thing is that the ZIBF is made in Africa, is located decisively in Africa, is organised on African terms and has an African agenda.

In 1995 at Beijing governments agreed to use information from women as an instrument for policy making. But this information needs to be accessed. African libraries are poor, neglected by governments and struggle for existence. African publishing itself contributes around 1% of world title input, although Africa has 8% of the worlds population.

In Africa we are slowly and cautiously realising that we cannot fight this battle successfully without the full participation of women. Each year the ZIBF has a focal theme, and I am delighted to tell you that for 1999 our theme will be Women. We are working hard to make sure that ZIBF99 helps to empower women at all levels to enter the information, book and publishing business, and to become effective players within it.

Women's information organisations who have played a prominent role in the ZIBF throughout the 1990s as exhibitors, conference organisers and in some cases being involved in the preplanning stage for the book fair next year include Zimbabwe Women Writers, Zambia Association for Research and Development, Women Ink, Kali for Women, ABANTU for Development, the African Gender Institute, the Gender and Development Centre.

Our ZIBF99 programme will open with a two day Indaba or conference entitled "Women's Voices: Gender, Books and Development". We will feature three outstanding women keynote speakers from the fields of environment, history and scholarship. We will have four special interest groups exploring themes around Writing, Publishing, Access to Information and Research.

The Association for the Development of Education in Africa Working Group on Female Participation have proposed a special programme under the heading of Gender Sensitive Educational Materials.

In addition our regular marketing workshop for African publishers will bring together 24 of the most enterprising and creative women publishers from all over Africa, Francophone, Lusophone and Anglophone. We are extremely grateful to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Netherlands government for the confidence they have shown in supporting this pioneering and highly successful workshop, now in its fourth year.

Key partners, the African Publishers Network (APNET) and the Pan-African Booksellers Convention (PABA), were born out of networking at previous book fairs. These two Pan-African organisations are working with us to develop the 1999 programme, including specialist contributions for their members - key players in the supply chain.

The University of Zimbabwe are planning an academic seminar on agender-related theme, as their contribution to our African Scholarship at ZIBF initiative.

We are working hard to raise sponsorship to bring as many African women librarians, writers and information workers to ZIBF99 as we possibly can. Our sponsorship programmes focus especially on participants from remote, disadvantaged and marginalised areas.

We are keen to encourage South-South and South-North linkages at the Book Fair. We invite women's organisations in the North both to take part in the Book Fair as exhibitors and to empower their partners in the South to attend as well.

In 1996 Hivos funded the Southern Partners Project at the ZIBF. This was a collective exhibition of Women Ink and its Southern partners during book fair week, and a seminar meeting was organised by WOMEN INK and KALI FOR WOMEN. This meant that northern partners empowered their Southern partners to exhibit at the book fair on this collective stand. Southern partners also used this opportunity to organise a seminar with other interested ZIBF participants. This is the package worked very well and we have since sought to replicate this at subsequent book fairs.

At ZIBF 98 the International Board on Books for Young People exhibited, contributed to the Indaba and held working meetings between Swiss, Kenyan and South African affiliates.

We encourage women's organisations based in the north to consider whether they can work with their southern partners to develop similar programmes of exhibiting at the book fair plus arranging meetings/events at zibf99 and invite progressive women's organisations with active information and publishing programmes to join us in planning and implementing events and initiatives which complement our core activities.

Our vision is of a programme whose effects will be felt long after ZIBF99 itself is over and which makes a real contribution to a sustainable information and publishing chain in Africa. The struggle for the recognition of women's achievements in various spheres goes on and we continue to see and hear voices that refuse to be stifled. We applaud women artists, painters, writers, publishers, professionals, information and cultural activists who have paved the way, penetrated and asserted their capabilities in previously male dominated domains, as well as human rights activists who want to see justice done in various spheres. We look forward to welcoming many of you at the Zimbabwe International Book Fair in Harare in August 1999.

I thank you.