Digitising legislation

How Laws.Africa digitises African legislation for public use.

Who is Laws.Africa?

Laws.Africa digitises African legislation for public use. We improve access to African law through the Legislation Commons, a machine-friendly collection of African legislation that is openly licensed.

Laws.Africa is a non-profit organisation based in Cape Town, South Africa.

Digitising legislation

Laws.Africa digitises legislation into a machine-friendly format called Akoma Ntoso. We then publish it on partner websites in formats that are easy to find, search, read and share. This improves access to, and understanding of, the law.

• OpenByLaws.org.za is a Laws.Africa project that makes up-to-date South African municipal by-laws available for free. Users can browse, search and read the by-laws on their laptops or mobile phones, and download PDFs to print or for offline use.

• NamibLII is a legal information website for Namibia, which includes legislation from Laws.Africa.

• Gazettes.Africa is a Laws.Africa project that makes African government gazettes available for free.

Machine-friendly legislation makes this possible. It means that a computer can understand the structure of the legislation and can automate a lot of tasks that used to be done by hand, such as creating a Table of Contents, text formatting, PDF generation, linking sections, etc.