Code for Africa

Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest federation of independent civic technology and data journalism laboratories, which use open source software and open data to build digital democracy services that give citizens timely and unfettered access to actionable information. 

This information and amplification tools empowers citizens to make informed decisions and that help to strengthen civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability.

CfA’s constituent members include country-based initiatives in Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Morocco, Nigeria, Senegal,Sierra Leone, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zimbabwe.

CfA is Africa’s only indigenous civic technology / open data / open government initiative that is also supported by an intensive data literacy / data journalism skills programme, the Academy (which is underwritten by the World Bank’s Global Media Development Programme and by the Google News Initiative), along with additional government implementation programmes in Sierra Leone and South Africa, plus civil society and media support programmes in six other African countries.

CfA nurtures innovation through its innovateAFRICA.fund and impactAFRICA.fund initiatives, which have seeded robust new startups and award-winning civic engagement campaigns.

CfA also already operates the continent’s largest non-government open data portal, openAFRICA.net (with 3,153 datasets from 60+ organisations), alongside the continent’s largest non-government document digitisation initiative, sourceAFRICA.net (with 115,000 documents from 47+ organisations), and is driving the continent’s largest digitisation of Government Gazettes through the gazeti.AFRICA platform with buy-in from agencies in Kenya, Malawi, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and South Africa (with a total of 38,046 gazettes already fully searchable going back to 1906, with 100s more coming online weekly). This depth of expertise and network partners in both government and civil society gives CfA a unique resource-base for new partnerships.

CfA country hubs are structured as core labs of full-time civic technologists and data wranglers / analysts and data storytellers / engagement experts, which work locally to empower carefully selected institutional partners in the media and civil society and research / academic space by helping build enabling technologies and by ‘liberating’ public interest data.