Afripedia Project


The Afripedia Project was launched in mid-June 2012 and is ongoing. It aims to expand offline Wikipedia access in French-speaking Africa, and encourage Africans to contribute to Wikipedia. The project installs local Kiwix-serve wireless and intranet servers and provides training and maintenance support.
The founding partners are Wikimédia France, the Institut Français, and the Agence universitaire de la Francophonie. French is spoken by an estimated 120 million people in Africa, spread across 24 francophone countries.
Access to Wikipedia from USB keys was not new in Africa, but keys are often very outdated, where Afripedia is regularly updated. Many of the partnering universities have low-bandwidth internet, but a few have no internet access.
The project offers additional content besides Wikipedia, such as Wiktionary. Any content that is first packaged in a ZIM file can be relayed over the Afripedia network; Project Gutenberg and Wikisource, for instance, are available as ZIM files.
The project also encourages the formation of Afripedia clubs for local users.
The project has been described as a worthy stopgap measure, until such time as internet access can be developed throughout Africa.

Timeline