A child in Accra can read a great deal and still never see their own street in a book. A Ghanaian child growing up abroad often never sees themselves at all. Both of those are fixable cheaply, and the Ghanaian end of the fix is better than most people expect.

— Books and bookshops in Accra

Ghanaian children’s publishing is the strong part

This is the best and cheapest corner of publishing in Ghana, and buying it is the simplest answer to the whole problem.

Meshack Asare is the senior figure. Sosu’s Call is where to start and it is a genuinely great picture book by any standard, not merely a good Ghanaian one. Elizabeth-Irene Baitie and Ruby Yayra Goka write for older children and have both won the Burt Award for African Literature.

Publishers worth knowing by name, because buying direct is cheapest and because these are who keep a backlist in print: Sub-Saharan Publishers, Afram Publications, Sedco, Smartline, Woeli Publishing Services and Digibooks.

African Bureau Stories is the one to watch. Accra-based, publishing picture and early chapter books by African writers and illustrators, and winner of the Bologna Prize for the best children’s publisher in Africa. It was founded by Deborah Ahenkorah, who also started the Golden Baobab prize for African children’s writing.

— Ghanaian authors worth reading

Forty free storybooks, in thirteen Ghanaian languages

Storybooks Ghana is a free open educational resource with forty stories, each in English and French and in thirteen Ghanaian languages: Akuapem Twi, Asante Twi, Fante, Ga, Dangme, Ewe, Dagbani, Dagaare, Frafra, Gonja, Hausa, Kasem and Nzema. Most come with audio, which matters if you read a language better than you speak it or the other way round.

It is licensed Creative Commons Attribution, so you can print it, copy it and use it in a classroom without asking anyone. For a parent trying to raise a child reading Twi or Ga, it is the most useful thing on this page and it costs nothing.

— Learning Twi and Ga

Where to buy in Accra

Bookshops, the pavement sellers, the traffic hawkers and the second-hand trade, all of which carry children’s books, and the second-hand sections are the best-used part of most shops.

— Books and bookshops in Accra — School textbooks in Ghana

Buy Ghanaian publishers by name rather than looking for imported series. An imported picture book in Accra carries shipping, duty and a thin market in its price, and it is the book least likely to show your child anything they recognise.

Personalised books

A personalised book puts your own child into the story as the main character. It is a gift rather than a library: one book, made once, usually kept.

Gli Books

glibooks.com is a Ghanaian-run personalised storybook service, and the closest thing to this idea done with Ghana as the setting rather than as decoration.

You upload one photo of your child, give their name, and choose a “reading buddy” — a sibling, a parent, an auntie — and their relationship to the child. The child is then illustrated into every page of the story. The launch title, Aseye and the Bridge in the Sky, is set in Kakum National Park, with Twi through the text and a glossary page. It comes as a 38-page hardcover.

What is genuinely good about it:

  • The setting is real and specific. A rainforest canopy walk at Kakum is a place a Ghanaian child can be taken to, which is a different thing from a generic jungle.
  • You see it before you pay. Two finished spreads with your child illustrated into them, so you are not buying blind.
  • It takes mobile money on Ghana orders, through a local processor, so it is not diaspora-only in practice.
  • The privacy policy is unusually clear for this kind of service, and is worth reading rather than assuming. It commits to the photo not being used to train any AI model, never being displayed, and being deleted when the book goes to print or within seven days of upload, whichever comes first.

— Gli Books’ privacy policy

Four things to know before you order, none of which are hidden but not all of which are on the front page:

  1. The illustration is AI-generated. The returns policy says so plainly — the results are “stylised interpretations and not photorealistic reproductions” — and the photo is sent to a US image-generation partner to render the pages. The front of the site does not mention it. It is a likeness in the book’s style, not a portrait, and that is the thing to set your expectations by.
  2. The refund window closes early. You can cancel for a full refund up until personalisation begins; after that you cannot, because a personalised book is exempt from the normal cancellation right. Damaged or misprinted books are replaced.
  3. The cancellation right it names is UK law, under the Consumer Contracts Regulations 2013. If you order from Accra, that is not the law protecting you, and Ghana has no close equivalent for a personalised import. In practice your remedy is the company’s own policy and its email address.
  4. It prices in pounds sterling. At its launch price the book is in the mid-twenties in pounds, which converts to a serious sum in cedis, and a Ghana order carries the exchange rate on top. Check the current price yourself rather than trusting any figure written here — it is a launch offer and this page is not the source of truth for it.

Two details contradict each other on their own site, so ask before buying for a particular child: the product page says the book suits ages five to eight and the FAQ says nought to six. The homepage says it ships to the UK, US and Canada while the FAQ says worldwide. Neither is a serious problem and both are worth one email.

The rating shown on the product page is described as early-reader feedback from a few dozen families rather than independent reviews, which is honest labelling and also means there is not yet an outside track record to go on. It is new. That is not a mark against it, but it is the situation.

What to check on any personalised book

The category has a lot of operators and the questions are the same for all of them:

  • What happens to the photograph? Who receives it, whether it trains a model, and when it is deleted. If a service will not say, that is the answer.
  • Do you see it before you pay?
  • When does the refund window close? For personalised goods it closes early everywhere.
  • Who prints it and where does it ship from? This decides both the wait and whether you pay duty.
  • Whose consumer law applies, which is rarely Ghana’s.
  • Is the setting real? A book that gilds a generic Africa is worse than a plain Ghanaian picture book from Sub-Saharan Publishers.

— Buying online in Ghana — Importing and customs — Online fraud in Ghana

When they outgrow them

Children’s books survive several children. Schools, community libraries and the second-hand trade all take them, and a picture book is the single most reliably wanted thing you can pass on.

— How to give away things you no longer need — Schools in Accra