Kunda Kids Premieres Afro-inspired animated series, Kunda and Friends

To inspire kids and create relatable African-inspired content for a global audience, Kunda Kids recently premiered a flagship animated series, Kunda and Friends in Lagos.

Earlier in the year, it premiered in 02 Arena in London and Nairobi.

Speaking on the inspiration behind Kunda and Friends, Kunda Kids, Oladele Olafunyi, Co-founder, said, “When I became a parent, I realised that when it came to programmes available to African children, the quality wasn’t at a world-class level. My wife and I sat down and we decided to build a company that will transform children’s learning and entertainment, and we started Kunda Kids. That’s why we started by publishing books, making music and animations, the Kunda Kids app, and a lot of exciting things that we are doing.

“At the beginning, it was tough. We started during the pandemic. The two big issues that have limited the creative industry in Africa, especially for the children’s space, are lack of talent and lack of funding, and we knew that for us to be successful in this space, we needed to find good talent and good funding. That’s why Kunda and Friends is produced in Uganda.”

He added that in making Kunda and Friends, they didn’t just want children to sit in front of the TV and be like Zombies. “We want them to be able to learn and have fun. While we look at the curriculum, we also look at what children will find entertaining, things that will help them also learn to become global citizens. Those are the things we look at to take inspiration when building Kunda and Friends. Most importantly fun.”

Louisa Olafuyi, Co-founder of Kunda Kids, revealed that Kunda and Friends sought to challenge some widely held stereotypes about Africans and African culture through unique character development.

“What we wanted to do is have characters from a lot of African places. I am Ugandan, my husband is Nigerian. It’s produced in Uganda, so everything that we do is from Africa. Sometimes, when people want to portray African characters, they want us to be dancing, they want us to be entertaining, but we want our characters to be intellectual.

“Fola is a mathematician, he’s so good with numbers, and we wanted to portray that to African children. We create unique characters, and we’re just hoping that we will continue to inspire children. Kunda is Ugandan and Nigerian, just like real-life Kunda, there’s ‘Sania’ who’s Indian-African, because people don’t realise there are also other ethnicities from Africa as well, and there’s Tammy who’s South African, so it’s a Pan African Programme.”

Raymond Malinda, the Director, Kunda and Friends, said that a lot of work had been put into developing the series, which targeted a unique audience, with a focus on raising a new generation of African children beaming with pride in their African roots.

“Target audience is preschoolers. We want the younger generation of African kids, and kids in Nigeria, to grow up seeing themselves and learning about themselves through characters that look like them. It’s been challenging developing this series, but we have gone through a lot of pipelines, developments, figuring out how we could make something like this sustainable for the African continent, so we can make even larger projects” he stated.

Belinda Nkechi Idimachi, Marketing Manager for Kunda Kids, explained that Kunda and Friends is Afro-music based,

“We are all about improving the representation of African children in media, with educational resources. We have an app that has stories about African heroes. People like Master Musa, Queen Aminat, Queen Moremi. The goal is to ensure that every African child sees themselves in the stories they read, and the animations they watch. That’s what we do differently from other children’s shows.”

Chike Obasi, Art Director for Kunda Kids believes that the release of Kunda and Friends was a huge step towards raising children who would become mainstays in the global community: “We’re trying to bridge that gap and make our stories heard round the world. That’s why we have Kunda Kids. We’re trying to raise global citizens.”