Laws.Africa Editor Guide
English
English
  • Welcome
  • Getting started
    • Lesson plan
    • Signing up
    • Digitising legislation
    • What is Akoma Ntoso
    • Terminology guide
  • Managing Works
    • Creating and editing works
      • Working with commencements
    • Deleting a document
    • Amending works
      • Creating the amending work
      • Linking the amendment
      • Creating a new document at the new point in time
      • Applying the amendments
      • Annotating the amendments
      • Example
      • Exercise
      • Consolidating the annotations
        • Simple example
        • Complicated example
    • Bulk imports (spreadsheet)
  • How-tos
    • Tasks
    • Importing a document
      • The importer
    • Cleaning up an import
    • Going back to a previous version of a document
    • Fixing all-caps headings
    • Working with tables
      • Table errors
    • Working with links
    • Working with italicised terms
    • Inserting an image
    • Inserting special characters
    • Resolving editor warnings
    • Making comments
    • Inserting editorial notes
    • Changing a document's date
    • Changing a document's short title or language
    • Search and rescue
    • How to handle different language documents
    • How to mark up defined terms which do not occur in a Definitions section
    • Very complicated amendments
      • Research
      • Undo some amendments?
      • Update the timeline
      • Create the tasks
      • Apply the amendments
  • Markup guide
    • Introduction
    • Marking up the structure
    • Preface, Long title, and Preamble
    • Headings
    • Marking up Schedules / Annexes
    • Marking up annotations
    • Marking up tables
    • Marking up links
    • Marking up images
    • Marking up footnotes
    • Marking up formatting
    • Marking up insertions and deletions
    • Keyword reference
  • Reviewing a document
    • Reviewing a document
    • Reviewer checklist
    • Signing off a work
  • Style Guides
    • Laws.Africa
    • Côte d'Ivoire
    • Ghana
    • Namibia
      • Regulations
    • Lesotho
    • Malawi
    • Nigeria
    • Zambia
    • South African Acts
    • South African By-laws
    • Tanzania
    • Uganda
    • UNEP
    • Zimbabwe
    • Seychelles
    • Mauritius
    • Pan-African Parliament/ AGP
    • Turks and Caicos
    • Papua New Guinea
    • eSwatini
    • Rwanda
    • Documents in languages other than English
  • Administration
    • Site settings
    • Managing administrators
    • Countries and localities
    • Document subtypes
    • Task labels
    • Taxonomies
    • Notion templates
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  • Who is Laws.Africa?
  • Digitising legislation
  1. Getting started

Digitising legislation

How Laws.Africa digitises African legislation for public use.

PreviousSigning upNextWhat is Akoma Ntoso

Last updated 3 years ago

Who is 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.

  • 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.

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

Laws.Africa
OpenByLaws.org.za
NamibLII
Gazettes.Africa