Kyeame#80,

January 2023 Newsletter

General News

One of kasahorow’s most notable developments in the latter half of 2022 was the addition of our American presence. We started our search for a Trustee to develop and support American language dictionaries, starting with Quechua.

We also focused on increasing efficiency and supporting our Language Managers. With our new sustainability model rolled out, we looked at how we could further streamline our metrics and give autonomy to our Language Managers to enable them to reach their goal of having their languages be self-funded. And we also began rolling out our revision dictionary to improve our users’ experience.

How Our Language Managers Feel

Our biannual language manager survey helps us understand how secure our language managers feel. Feeling secure means we are able to keep and manage relationships and work through challenges by communicating without fear or anxiety, thus making kasahorow a functioning productive environment.

Once again, we’ve seen a decline in the number of positive responses, with 75% of managers indicating that they feel secure and supported at kasahorow (a decrease of 13% from our previous survey). Comments received indicate that language managers would like more support to improve their metrics and more communication to understand our recent changes, so this will continue to be a focus area for our Regional Trustees as we start the new year.
Africa Report

We had some challenges with the transition to the new sustainability model, but language managers are starting to adapt to the new policies and we now have a total of 71 active languages. 31 languages are at 100% sustainability, 15 languages are at 70%, 1 language is at 35%, 6 languages are at 15% and 7 languages are at 5%. 42 languages made royalty sales on Amazon in the thirteenth month.

Swahili (at 100% sustainability) recorded the highest selling African book on Amazon in the thirteenth month with a total of FNC 647.28. Wolof (at 100% sustainability) recorded the second highest sales with FNC 308.23.

The last half of the year saw a drop in invoices especially in the thirteenth month values and a drop in the number of active Language Managers.

KASAHOROW was sad to say farewell to William Agbo, our Trustee for Africa, at the end of 2022. William played a major role in the growth of kasahorow over the years and his leadership and guidance will be missed. We are excited to have Richard Amoateng and Taibat Fasina taking on this role as we start 2023. Richard and Taibat have been at kasahorow for a number of years and we know that our African Language Managers are in good hands.
Award
The manager who has shown continued commitment and zeal is the Yoruba manager, Taibat Fasina, who recently got promoted to Managing Trustee. Congratulations Taibat!

Europe Report

The transition to sustainability has been smooth with all languages currently at 5%. French and Swiss-German are at 100% sustainability. Europe has nine active Language Managers and we currently have four languages making royalty sales from Amazon.

French leads the highest sales in book royalties, recording its highest in October 2022 (FNC 1458.05). German, Spanish, Swiss-German and Portuguese made royalties from dictionary sales of FNC 538.84, FNC 173.07, FNC 74.03, and FNC 1.09 respectively in the months October and December 2022.

The last half of the year saw a drop in general invoice values and number of active Language Managers. We hope to reverse this trend and get more royalty sales.

Award

Throughout this sustainability period, the manager who has shown continued commitment is the Turkish Language Manager, Mehmetsalih Emin. Thank you for your continued zeal in working for a difference.

Asia Report

As usual, Asian languages have reached their goals. Without the continued contribution of our Language Managers, we wouldn’t be able to achieve this. Our Asian Language Managers have been actively engaged in dealing with comments and feedback, making corrections, improving trustee-manager interaction and response time to messages, and translation work.

With the new sustainability model, some languages saw a drop in their invoices and we have worked to rebuild their income. The total invoice for Asian Languages was back up to FNC 1025.51 in December 2022 after declining to about half this amount in November. We saw a drop in the number of actively managed languages, from 20 to 12 over this period, including Malayalam and Marathi. We hope to have them back soon.

Sinhala, Bengali, Urdu and Panjabi have had significant sales in the past six months, with Sinhala language books topping the list.

I personally would like to thank William Agbo for his great support to me and my team to achieve this success. I would also like to welcome Tai Fasina and Richard Amoateng and thank the rest of the team that has given us tremendous support, Paa, Rikke and Claire.

As a team, we hope to grow more this year and achieve kasahorow’s goals.

Award

Once again, Siti Farhani Mahamed Ali, the Malay Language Manager, was the highest earner among Asian Language Managers, with sales of FNC 190.62 for September 2022. Well done, Siti!

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