Africa Podcast Festival to Bring Together Podcasters From Across the Continent

Touted as the first podcast event to bring together Africans from across the continent and the world, the Africa Podcast Festival gets underway in Kenya on Friday. The gathering will connect thousands to the world of podcasts and show them how to get into the popular medium, organisers say.

This year's theme is: "We're proud to be here!" which encapsulates the energy and interest in podcasts coming from the African continent.

The Africa Podcast Festival, which starts aptly on 12 February, World Podcast Day, is an effort to get more people listening and creating podcasts for an African audience says Melissa Mbugwa, one of the co-directors of the festival.

She said “It's at that point now that people need to connect and organise in order to take the industry to the next level. Over the next few years, we expect to see more organisation around the podcasting community and podcasting on the continent. Languages that are widely spoken on the continent are Swahili, Arabic, Amharic, Yoruba, Zulu... We are starting to see quite a number of them popping up - this is an expectation we have of the future of the podcasting industry, is that we will have many languages, and uninhibited by the language barrier”