Africans have limited access to the vast poetic work of both historical and contemporary African poets. This means that many Africans are not inspired and influenced by their own writers and poets – negatively impacting their personal growth, identity, development and sense of place. Badilisha was initiated in 2008 as an annual, large-scale international poetry festival. It produced festivals for three years, as well as a series of related poetry interventions in the form of seminars, workshops and training programmes. The project as of 2012 evolved into an audio archive and radio show, aiming to address two key issues: the absence of any readily accessible archive of Pan-African poets, and the need for a new stage in which Pan-African poetry could reach a global audience.