What’s Working in Africa: Free Knowledge Africa
Making African knowledge visible, discoverable and accessible to the world
Free Knowledge Africa (FKA) began in Nigeria in 2020 with a core belief: African knowledge should be freely accessible, and Africans should shape knowledge about the continent. FKA works to make knowledge accessible, bridge knowledge gaps, preserve cultural heritage, and promote digital literacy through open resources. Its vision is a world where African knowledge, culture, and innovation are freely shared, celebrated, and accessible to all.
Over the past five years, FKA has grown across open knowledge, digitisation, research and knowledge management, and cultural heritage preservation. It has worked with organisations including the Wikimedia Foundation, Creative Commons, the National Library of Nigeria, and Open Restitution Africa. A major digitisation initiative focused on Nigeria’s public domain, making more than 6,000 works including newspapers, gazettes, portraits and other historical materials freely available through PublicDomain.ng. The project brings historically valuable materials into the digital public sphere for researchers, educators, creators and the wider public.
Our work with open knowledge communities also revealed a deeper challenge. When we set out to improve African content on Wikipedia, we found that correcting inaccurate or incomplete information often depended on finding reliable secondary sources. Yet much of the relevant knowledge was fragmented across repositories, archives, journals, websites and physical collections. That experience led us to a bigger question: what happens after knowledge is created or digitised?
Knowledge can exist online and still be difficult to find. Research can sit in a repository without being properly indexed by search engines or research databases. Digital collections can lack the metadata and persistent identifiers needed to connect them with related knowledge. And researchers can produce valuable work without a clear picture of who is discovering, using or building upon it.
This is the problem FKA is now addressing through the Access to African Knowledge Hub (AAKH).
AAKH focuses on research and knowledge infrastructure, working with universities, journals, libraries, archives, museums and other knowledge organisations to improve digital visibility, accessibility, metadata quality and global discoverability. Through the Research Visibility Accelerator and Institutional Knowledge Partnerships, it helps organisations audit research outputs, improve metadata, use persistent identifiers and DOIs, strengthen researcher profiles, enhance repository and journal discoverability, and advance open access and knowledge management.
This marks a deliberate shift: from digitising and opening access to knowledge, to building systems that make African knowledge findable, connected and reusable.
What can the Africa Evidence Network (AEN) evidence ecosystem learn from FKA?
FKA’s experience shows that producing evidence is only one part of the knowledge journey. Evidence also needs the infrastructure, metadata, identifiers and discoverability pathways that allow it to be found, connected and reused, and this is particularly important for African research that deserves a much wider global audience.
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“Africa does not lack knowledge. Too much of it remains fragmented, difficult to discover, or disconnected from the wider knowledge ecosystem. Our opportunity is not only to create more knowledge, but to build better pathways for African knowledge to be found, connected and used.”
