The African Storybook (ASb) is a multilingual literacy initiative that works with educators and children to publish openly licensed picture storybooks for early reading in the languages of Africa. An initiative of Saide, the ASb has an interactive website that enables users to read, create, download, translate, and adapt storybooks. The initiative addresses the dire shortage of children’s storybooks in African languages, crucial for children’s literacy development. As of September 2020 website had nearly 6,700 storybooks in 222 languages spoken in Africa, consisting of nearly 2000 original titles and translations of those titles. Background According to the UNESCO’s 2013/2014 Education for All Global Monitoring Report, 30 million children in sub-Saharan Africa are out of school and over half of the children who reach grade 4 are not learning the basics in reading. These challenges are related to and exacerbated by the shortage of children’s reading material available in Africa, particularly in African languages; the major impetus for the ASb. Developing mother tongue literacy before transitioning to a language of wider communication (e.g., English or French) is the policy in most sub-Saharan countries, and supported by the African Storybook initiative. Due to the low purchasing power and demand for storybooks in Africa, along with the large number of languages, conventional publishing produces relatively few titles, in African languages. The open license digital publishing model of the African Storybook initiative, by contrast, makes it possible for people to custom publish their own storybooks, to print storybooks, and to read them on mobile devices. The ASb also places content creation in the form of writing and translation in the hands of the communities who need storybooks for early reading in familiar languages. The ASb was given start-up funding by Comic Relief from the United Kingdom, and is now funded by various sources, including the Cameron Schrier Foundation, the Zenex Foundation and the Oppenheimer Memorial Trust. Sadly, Tessa Welch, the project leader and one of the founders passed away in July 2020. Saide continues to remain the home of the initiative, providing support and guidance to the small team of in-house staff and consultants. Storybooks Virtually all the storybooks on the site are by African authors, with content ranging from traditional folktales and contemporary stories to poems, traditional games and songs. Authors are mostly educators – teachers, librarians, academics – who contribute stories in order to have storybooks for their educational contexts and to