WELCOME TO AFRICA SPEAKS

Mrs. Modupe Ehirim serves as the Chairperson of Africa Speaks. She previously served as president of the Christian Booksellers Association of Nigeria for seven years (2009 to 2016) and is currently a member of the board of Oasis International Ltd., publishers of Africa Study Bible. She founded Hidden Treasures Bookstore, a brick-and-mortar retail bookstore in Enugu, Nigeria in 2003, after a 17-year career in engineering and administration with the Central Bank of Nigeria. She retired from book selling in 2015.

Dr. Ouoba serves as the Vice-Chairperson of Africa Speaks. He is the International Director of Centre de Publications Evangéliques (CPE – Center for Evangelical Publications), the largest Christian publisher in French-speaking Africa. He holds PhD in communication and teaches at the University of Bordeaux and Institut Biblique du Bénin. A trainer of writers in several French-speaking African countries, founder of the African Institute of Publishing and sits on boards of several Christian organizations in Africa.

Liz serves as the secretary of Africa Speaks. She has been in full-time Christian ministry since 1989. In 1992, she joined CLC International, a Mission working in more than 40 countries, in the multi areas of publishing, retail and wholesale distribution of Bibles, Christian books and other resources. Since 2009 until the present date, she has served as CLC Africa’s regional director, and currently offers consultancy services to the ministry in Benin, Burkina Faso, Ivory Coast, Kenya, Mozambique and Sierra Leone. She grew up in the UK, studied in France, and has also lived in Portugal, Cameroon, Angola, and Mozambique. She is widely traveled, including having visited 14 different countries on the African continent for ministry purposes, many of them multiple times.

Gathuku serves as the Executive Secretary of Africa Speaks. He is the co-founder and Chairman of Timazi Africa, a Kenya-based high-school students’ ministry established in 2007, with a special focus on publishing discipleship resources for youth in English-speaking Africa. Their flagship publication Timazi magazine is published three times a year and distributed to Christian Unions in over 400 high schools in Kenya. He started the Annual Readership Challenge that brings together over 3,000 teenagers as part of developing a culture of reading Christian literature among youth. Gathuku has previously been a speaker in Christian conferences in Ghana, Sierra Leone, Rwanda, Zambia, Burundi, Nigeria, Uganda, USA, South Korea and Singapore. He holds a Master’s degree in Ministry Leadership, a Bachelor’s degree in Chemistry, an Associate degree in Child and Youth Character Development, and is a doctoral student at Biola University.

Edward is a trustee of Africa Speaks and has over 50 years experience in the publishing industry. He started his career as a Christian education consultant at David C Cook Publishers in the 60s and later joined Tyndale House Publishers. He is the founder of Oasis International Ltd whose mission is to grow discipleship through publishing African works. Publisher of the Africa Study Bible and other books written by African authors, Oasis is committed to discovering, developing, and distributing books by African authors who communicate Truth clearly in African contexts.

Tim serves as the Treasurer for Africa Speaks. He served as a missionary in Côte d’Ivoire for 31 years with SIM (Serving In Mission), including 22 years as National Director. He began working in Côte d’Ivoire as a graphic artist, editor, and production manager at CPE, a Christian publisher in Abidjan. Tim is the author of Africans and Africa in the Bible, and he also wrote a children’s version, Africa and the Bible from A to Z, which is set to appear in 2023. He has five books published in French dealing with areas of practical theology, such as prophecy, healing, leadership and spiritual balance. In addition, Tim was the general editor of the Bible d’étude Africaine (2015), the first African perspective study Bible to appear on the African continent in any language. He was also a contributor to the Africa Study Bible which appeared in English in 2017. Most recently he authored New Funding Models for Global Mission: Learning from the Majority World, which was published in 2023. Tim received his DMin in Transformational Leadership from the Université de l’Alliance Chrétienne d’Abidjan in 2019. He is married to his marvelous wife, Janet. They have two adult children and four grandchildren. Tim is now based in the United States where he serves as the Ministry Point Person for Literature for SIM worldwide.