Asili Media is an AI-native literary and media company teaching African languages and culture — beautiful, dignified stories for the next generation of African children, at home and across the diaspora.
Asili means origin. We're an AI-native literary and media company teaching African languages and culture — using the future of technology to tell the beautiful stories of our origin and our culture.The Asili Media mission
Africa is home to more than 2,000 languages. Only a handful have well-made media for children, and the AI models shaping the future are trained overwhelmingly on English.
Urban and diaspora children are losing touch with their mother tongues. Over 300 African languages are considered endangered — partly for want of a digital presence.
There's a deep shortage of high-quality, culturally-true and genuinely fun educational stories made for the modern African child.
Beautiful, localised children's media in dozens of dialects has always been too slow and too expensive for traditional publishing. Until now.
A unified place to entertain and educate at the same time — across screens, pages, and speakers.
Premium animated series like Zizi Mizizi that celebrate Africa as it truly is — no poverty tropes, no safari clichés, no generic "somewhere in Africa".
Language-learning picture books for every age and reading level, in a growing set of African languages — making learning authentic, fun and easy to reach.
Original songs and audio guides — because there's no better way to learn a language than while grooving to it.
Vocabulary and syntax woven straight into the stories, so the learning never feels like a lesson.
Zizi is a four-year-old Kenyan-Nigerian girl living in London — born in Lagos to a Kenyan mama and a Nigerian baba, carrying both homes wherever she goes. A beaded Kenyan-flag bracelet on her wrist glows to life whenever her feelings run high, opening a portal to a specific, vividly real corner of Kenya.
Her companion is Kobe Msafiri — an ordinary green pet turtle in London who steps through the portal and becomes a bespectacled, dignified guide with the warm wit of a beloved Kenyan grandfather.
Kobe never solves Zizi's problems for her. He guides, he watches over her — and by the end of every adventure Zizi finds the answer herself, learns to steady her own big feelings, and picks up a little more Swahili along the way.
Every frame is AI-generated — no traditional 3D rigging, modelling or keyframing. One person can take an episode from script to screen.
| Zizi Mizizi | Category median | |
|---|---|---|
| Cost per finished minute | ~$16 | ~$12,700 |
| Cost per episode (6 min) | ~$95 | ~$76,000 |
| Production team | 1 | 15+ |
| Time per episode | 3–4 weeks | 6–12 months |
Near-zero marginal cost means the break-even audience for an episode is tiny. The economics that blocked African-language media for decades no longer apply.
Benchmark: UK industry survey of animated children's series, per-minute production cost. Indicative, not current-year audited data.
Every illustration is of Black children, Black families and African life. These books fill a long-standing gap in learning materials that too often default to non-African imagery — giving young readers a visual world that looks like their own.
600+ words across 20+ everyday categories — a direct, joyful expression of the language-teaching thesis.
A tender story about big feelings and a new arrival, told with warmth and a fully African cast.
A notebook celebrating Africa's linguistic range — the culture-forward companion to the series.
AI runs through every stage of production — which is how one creator can make what used to take a team of fifteen. Faster turnaround, more languages, more stories.
Scripts, dialogue and expansive world-building developed with large language models, then shaped by hand.
Character designs, book illustrations and storyboards generated and refined rapidly, frame by frame.
Original songs and jingles that carry the Swahili chorus at the heart of every episode.
Regional text-to-speech so books can be read aloud with authentic pronunciation for learners.
Create the language layer once, then re-point across Yoruba, Amharic, Twi, Luo and more — in books and video alike.
Routes into regional broadcasters, publishers and diaspora markets — so the work actually reaches the children it's for.
Founder of Asili Media — writer, creator, and one-person studio. Kenyan by origin and building for African children everywhere, Laura writes under the name Arina Okafor and is turning Asili into a home for authentic African stories. Let's work together to bring more of them into the world.
Partner, publish, or just say hello. Asili Media is looking for collaborators, broadcasters and publishers across Africa and the diaspora.
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