The Saide story began in 1992, as a registered public benefit organisation based in Johannesburg, with a mission to enable successful open learning for all. Saide is an education support organisation founded on social justice and open learning principles, with the vision of a society where all people value, have access to and succeed in lifelong education and training.

Our stories span the early childhood development, schooling, training and vocational sectors, through to higher education and continuous professional development. We promote fair access to transformative education for everyone, regardless of their gender, race, culture or socio-economic background. Saide has experience in facilitating and managing networks and large projects to plan and coordinate the design, development, implementation, evaluation and sharing of distance education programmes, courses and materials, and promoting the use of Open Educational Resources (OER) to support open learning.

Saide’s early learning story expanded in 2014 with the African Storybook Initiative (ASb). ASb combines digital technology and open license publishing principles to provide access for millions of readers to storybooks at very low cost. This is part of Saide’s mission to facilitate sharing knowledge freely and breaking down barriers to educational resources.​ There are currently 5020 unique storybooks on the ASb website, with 8278 translations into 251 languages of Africa. Through the ASb website and mobile Apps adults and children are able to read, download, print, create, adapt and translate storybooks.