We were joined in this session by Kamran Kardan, Founder and CEO of Zendy. His presentation centered around the barriers African researchers face in accessing academic resources and highlighted Zendy’s innovative approach to bridging the knowledge gap across the continent.

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Session summary

The webinar session focused on Zendy’s innovative solutions to address major barriers African researchers face in accessing scholarly literature. Zendy provides an AI-powered digital library designed for accessibility, affordability, and discoverability across diverse African contexts. Recognizing challenges such as limited internet connectivity and high subscription costs, Zendy optimizes its platform for low-bandwidth environments and offers offline reading capabilities, ensuring researchers can continue their work regardless of connectivity.

The platform includes a vast collection of academic journals, proceedings, and e-books across all disciplines, combining open access and paywalled content to serve a broad range of users. Advanced AI tools like ZAIA, an AI research assistant, help users quickly find relevant papers, summarize lengthy articles, and highlight key research concepts, significantly streamlining literature reviews and enhancing research efficiency.

Zendy’s partnerships with universities, research centers, and ministries of education enable subsidized subscription models that significantly reduce costs for students and academic staff, particularly in North and East Africa. Emphasis was placed on localized search features and curated content collections tailored to the specific needs of African researchers. Language barriers are addressed by expanding content in French, Arabic, and Portuguese and exploring machine translation tools to facilitate multilingual access.

Plans to enhance the mobile user experience, increase open access content, and broaden geographic reach were also discussed. The session underscored the importance of strategic collaborations and the adoption of innovative technologies as vital for democratizing access to knowledge and empowering African researchers to participate fully in the global scholarly community. The webinar session explored how Zendy, an AI-powered digital research library, is transforming access to scholarly literature for African researchers by addressing critical barriers such as limited internet connectivity and high costs. Zendy optimizes its platform for low-bandwidth environments and offers offline reading features, ensuring researchers can continue accessing resources even in areas with poor internet. The platform provides a comprehensive collection of academic journals, reports, and e-books across disciplines, including both open access and subscription-based content, making it especially valuable for researchers without institutional affiliations.

Advanced AI tools embedded within Zendy, like ZAIA, help users efficiently navigate vast research content by summarizing lengthy articles, highlighting key phrases, and delivering context-sensitive insights—streamlining the literature review process. The platform also includes localized search features and curated content collections designed to meet the specific research needs of African academics.

Zendy’s partnerships with universities, research centers, and ministries of education aim to provide subsidized subscriptions that make academic content more affordable for students and scholars, particularly in North and East Africa. It actively expands its multilingual content offerings, including French, Arabic, and Portuguese, and explores machine translation tools to overcome language barriers.

Future plans include broadening geographic reach across the continent, enhancing mobile accessibility, increasing open-access offerings, and deepening collaborations with local institutions. The session emphasized that Zendy’s strategic model of affordable access, combined with AI-driven discovery tools, can empower African researchers, reduce knowledge inequities, and promote inclusive participation in global scholarly communication.

Speaker’s profile

Kamran Robert Kardan is the founder and Chief Executive Officer of Knowledge E. He founded Knowledge E in 2012, to provide unique, professional, and high-quality services to the
information professionals in the Middle Eastern region and beyond.

He is also the Co-founder and Managing Director at Zendy, an organization that is focused on making academic research affordable and accessible around the world.

Kamran has 20 years of experience working in the publishing industry on both the publisher and agency front. Working closely with some of the top consortia, libraries, ministries, hospitals, and corporations within research and education in the region, he has experienced the birth and growth of many digital libraries. Driven by his interest in learning societies, he has initiated and participated in the completion of various special development projects.

Kamran holds a BSc in Engineering, an MSc in Marketing with a thesis on ‘Open Access publishing business models’, as well as an MBA from the University of Manchester with a dissertation on ‘The application of Business Model Canvas in university research offices’.

Kamran plays a major active role in the Knowledge E Foundation, a community interest corporation focusing on supporting education and research-based projects across the globe, with a focus on developing nations.

LinkedIn: /kamrankardan/
ORCID: 0000-0003-4324-7620

Related resources

Zendy’s website: zendy.io

About the webinar series

This webinar was co-organized by UbuntuNet Alliance and Access 2 Perspectives as part of the ORCID Global Participation Program.

ORCID is the persistent identifier for researchers to share their accomplishments (research articles, data, etc with funding agencies, publishers, data repositories, and other research workflows.

AfricArXiv is a community-led digital archive for African research communication. By enhancing the visibility of African research, we enable discoverability and collaboration opportunities for African scientists on the continent as well as globally.