annual-report.html

---
layout: simple
---

<div>
  <header class="mb-5 py-5 triangles-header">
    <div class="triangles-header__triangle-top-left"></div>
    <div class="container">
      <h1 class="display-4">Laws Africa 2021 Annual Report</h1>
      <div class="red-underline mb-4"></div>
      <ul class="annual-report-topic-list">
      </ul>
    </div>
    <div class="triangles-header__triangle-bottom-right"></div>
  </header>

  <div class="container">
    <div class="row">
      <div class="col-3 d-none d-sm-block">
        <aside class="sidebar sticky">
          <h4 class="mt-5">Table of Contents</h4>
          <ol id="toc" class="list-unstyled">
          </ol>
        </aside>
      </div>

      <div class="col-sm-9 mb-5" data-tocify="#toc">
        <article class="prose scroll-x">
          <section class="mb-4" >
            <h2 id="sect-1" class="text-primary mb-4 d-flex align-items-center">
              <span class="right-angle-triangle-right mr-2"></span>
              About
            </h2>
            <p>
              Laws.Africa researches, digitises and disseminates high-quality African legislation to partners and
              audiences in Africa and around the world.
            </p>
            <p>
              Making African law freely available supports the rule of law, improves human rights and access to
              justice, enables business and helps communities to thrive.
            </p>
            <p>
              As a member of the global Free Access to Law Movement (FALM), we monitor and address the significant
              deficit of reliable primary legal materials from sub-Saharan Africa in areas such as human rights, the
              environment, commerce and technology. Our core work focuses on digitising and publishing African
              government gazettes, updated legislation and case law.
            </p>
            <p>
              We build cutting edge technology to manage digital legislation databases, and enable access-to-justice
              innovations using structured legislative information. Through our publishing partners, our content
              is available for free to over 450,000 users every month. We provide services, training and support
              to African governments to improve their capacity to manage their legislation, keep it up-to-date, and
              make it freely available to the public.
            </p>
          </section>
          <section class="mb-4">
            <h2 id="sect-2" class="text-primary mb-4 d-flex align-items-center">
              <span class="right-angle-triangle-right mr-2"></span>
              Letter from our co-founders
            </h2>
            <p>
              In March 2021 we launched our Uganda national laws collection, a curated set of the most requested Uganda
              national legislation. The collection launched in partnership with ULII.org and, in the first three months,
              received over 130,000 views, indicating the demand and importance of free access to up-to-date
              laws in Africa.
            </p>
            <p>
              In the coming months we will be launching four new legislation collections:
            </p>
            <ul>
              <li>Zimbabwe and South Africa (Provincial), with support from the Indigo Trust;</li>
              <li>Malawi and Zambia, with support from the Indigo Trust and the National Endowment for Democracy (NED); and</li>
              <li>Lesotho, with support from the LII Fund for Africa.</li>
            </ul>

            <p>
              As the pandemic continues to impact livelihoods and lives across Africa and the world, we’re grateful
              to our funders and partners for continuing to support our mission to improve access to African law,
              and to the Laws.Africa team for their hard work and dedication.
            </p>

            <p>This work matters. Stay safe.</p>

            <div class="row">
              <div class="col-6">
                <div class="founder-details">
                  <img src="/img/team/greg.jpg"
                       alt="co-founder-and-cto"
                       class="founder-details__img"/>
                  <div>
                    <div>Greg Kempe</div>
                    <div><strong>Co-founder and CTO</strong></div>
                  </div>
                </div>
              </div>
              <div class="col-6">
                <div class="founder-details">
                  <img src="/img/team/mariya.jpg"
                       alt="co-founder-and-cto"
                       class="founder-details__img"/>
                  <div>
                    <div>Greg Kempe</div>
                    <div><strong>Chairperson</strong></div>
                  </div>
                </div>
              </div>
            </div>
          </section>
          <section class="mb-4">
            <h2 id="sect-3" class="text-primary mb-4 d-flex align-items-center">
              <span class="right-angle-triangle-right mr-2"></span>
              Access to law
            </h2>
            <p>
              Increased availability of up-to-date legislation makes judicial systems more efficient, improves
              access to justice and supports human rights.
            </p>
            <p>
              Between July 2020 and June 2021, we doubled the amount of legislation available to the public
              through our publishing partners.
            </p>

            <div class="callout-box mb-4">
              Lorem Callout
<!--              <div class="mb-2">-->
<!--                <ul>-->
<!--                  <li class="h4">90% growth in full-content legislative documents</li>-->
<!--                  <li class="h4">1321 new legislative documents</li>-->
<!--                  <li class="h4">3 new collections: Zimbabwe, Uganda and South African Provincial</li>-->
<!--                </ul>-->
<!--              </div>-->
            </div>

            <p>
              All of our legislation is available for free in mobile-friendly web and PDF format through our
              <a href="https://laws.africa/commons" target="_blank">publication partners</a>. Researchers, analysts and
              application developers can also access it as high-quality,
              machine-friendly Akoma Ntoso XML through our <a href="https://laws.africa/api/" target="_blank">
              Content API</a>.
            </p>

            <h3 id="sect-3_sub-sect-1">Uganda Grey Book launch</h3>
            <p>
              In June 2021 we launched an updated Uganda Grey Book in partnership with the Uganda Legal Information Institute
              (ULII), a project of the Judiciary of Uganda based in Kampala. The Grey Book is a selection of 98 Acts and 8
              Statutory Instruments are now up-to-date and available, for free, at
              <a href="http://www.ulii.org" target="_blank">www.ulii.org.</a>
            </p>
            <p>
              The year-long project involved hunting down and digitising mouldy gazettes scattered across Kampala,
              reading hundreds of notices to identify amendments and other notices, and finally bringing the 2000
              consolidation up to date. Laws.Africa’s gazette and legislation technology made this process simpler and faster.
            </p>
            <div class="callout-box mb-4">
              Lorem Callout
<!--              <div class="h4 text-primary">-->
<!--                <a href="https://laws.africa/2021/06/30/uganda-national-legislation-collection.html" target="_blank">-->
<!--                  How we launched the Uganda Grey Book 2021-->
<!--                </a>-->
<!--              </div>-->
<!--              <div class="h4">-->
<!--                <q>-->
<!--                  The Uganda Law Reform Commission completed the last official revision and consolidation of the Laws-->
<!--                  of Uganda in the early 2000s. It updated legislation up to and including 31 December 2001-->
<!--                </q>-->
<!--              </div>-->
            </div>

            <h3 id="sect-3_sub-sect-2">COVID-19 Regulations</h3>
            <p>
              The pandemic has changed all our lives and produced what must be the fastest changing set of regulations in
              African history. In South Africa, these regulations change weekly, and ensuring that readers have up-to-dat
              e information is essential.
            </p>
            <p>
              We continue to maintain our special COVID-19 collection and publish them through AfricanLII. In many cases,
              these are the only up-to-date versions of these regulations that are freely available to the public.
            </p>

            <p>
              Our collection includes COVID-19 regulations for 11 countries: Botswana, Ghana, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius,
              Namibia, South Africa, eSwatini, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
            </p>
          </section>
          <section class="mb-4">
            <h2 id="sect-4" class="text-primary mb-4 d-flex align-items-center">
              <span class="right-angle-triangle-right mr-2"></span>
              Gazettes and transparency
            </h2>
            <p>
              The government gazette is the official newspaper of record of important public information relating to
              governance, investment, commerce, legislation and regulatory reform. Yet, there is a dearth of both paper
              and digital archives of this essential government publication in many African countries.
            </p>
            <p>
              Laws.Africa and AfricanLII digitise and publish more than 35,000 African gazettes from 19 African countries and
              regional economic communities on gazettes.africa, freely available to all. It is the biggest digital collection
              of freely available African gazettes in the world.
            </p>
            <div class="callout-box mb-4">
              Lorem Callout
<!--              <ul>-->
<!--                <li class="h4">9,930 new gazettes added in the last year</li>-->
<!--                <li class="h4">-->
<!--                  4 new jurisdictions: Ghana, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, and the East African Economic Community-->
<!--                  (EAC).-->
<!--                </li>-->
<!--                <li>-->
<!--                  <a class="h4" href="https://gazettes.africa">Browse gazettes on Gazettes.Africa</a>-->
<!--                </li>-->
<!--              </ul>-->
            </div>

            <h3 id="sect-4_sub-sect-1">Gazette preservation is critical</h3>
            <p>
              A fire in early 2021 at the University of Cape Town, obliterated the government gazette archives of the
              University. The entire archive of hundreds of thousands of government gazettes from a wide range of
              African countries has been lost. Laws.Africa and AfricanLII were only able to digitise and make public a
              small fraction of these gazettes before this disaster.
            </p>
            <p>
              This disaster has highlighted the urgent need to preserve and expand African digital gazettes archives.
              We are using this opportunity to build global partnerships to help us to continue these activities.
            </p>
            <p>
              We appeal to the legal, librarian and development community to assist us with access to physical gazette
              collections, digitised documents, or funds to help digitise government gazettes.
            </p>

            <div class="callout-box mb-4">
              Lorem Callout
<!--              <ul>-->
<!--                <li class="h4">Help preserve Gazettes before more are lost</li>-->
<!--              </ul>-->
            </div>

            <h3 id="sect-4_sub-sect-2">Preservation and transparency partnerships</h3>
            <p>
              We have partnered with three organisations to boost our gazette digitisation activities and to exchange
              gazette collections.
            </p>

            <h3 id="sect-4_sub-sect-3">C4ADS</h3>
            <p>
              <a href="https://c4ads.org" target="_blank">C4ADS</a> is a non-profit organisation dedicated to providing data-driven analysis and evidence-based reporting
              on global conflict and transnational security issues. C4ADS assists Laws.Africa with funds to digitise African
              gazettes in support of their research and activities.
            </p>
            <p>
              Through our African Gazette partnership, C4ADS has exposed XXX and YYY.
            </p>
            <h4 id="sect-4_sub-sect-3_sub-sect-1">LLMC</h4>
            <p>
              LLMC is a non-profit cooperative of libraries dedicated to the twin goals of preserving legal titles
              and government documents. Through our gazette exchange program, Laws.Africa and LLMC share access to
              digital government gazettes and ensure that these crucial resources are preserved and stored redundantly
              in different parts of the world.
            </p>
            <h4 id="sect-4_sub-sect-3_sub-sect-2">Webber Wentzel</h4>
            <p>
              he South African law firm Webber Wentzel has donated a large collection of South African national gazettes
              dating from the early 1900s to the 1990s which we are in the process of digitising. We are grateful to
              <a href="https://www.webberwentzel.com/" target="_blank">Webber Wentzel</a> for their support on this project, which will put tens of thousands of historical
              South African gazettes online.
            </p>
          </section>
          <section class="mb-4">
            <p>
              Laws.Africa builds cutting edge technology to manage and publish digital legislation databases. We conduct
              ongoing user research to understand the needs of a wide range of legal information users and stakeholders
              across Africa, and use this to continually improve the availability and accessibility of this information.
            </p>

            <h3 id="sect-5_sub-sect-1">Using Akoma Ntsoso in Africa</h3>
            <p>
              Akoma Ntoso (AKN) is the leading XML markup standard for legal documents. Laws.Africa uses it because it
              captures rich metadata and structural information and allows a computer to automate common tasks.
            </p>
            <p>
              Akoma Ntoso (AKN) is the leading XML markup standard for legal documents. Laws.Africa uses it because it
              captures rich metadata and structural information and allows a computer to automate common tasks.
            </p>
            <p>
              We hope that the recommendation will help others apply the Akoma Ntoso open standard to African legislative
              documents, and help to make African legal information more interconnected and useful.
            </p>
          </section>
          <section class="mb-4">
            <h2 id="sect-6" class="d-flex align-items-center">
              <span class="right-angle-triangle-right mr-2"></span>
              Organisation
            </h2>
            <h3 id="sect-6_sub-sect-1">Laws.Africa joins the Free Access to Law Movement (FALM)</h3>
            <p>
              We’re excited to announce that Laws.Africa is officially a member of the global
              <a href="http://www.fatlm.org/">Free Access to Law
              Movement</a> (FALM). The FALM was established in 2002 in Montreal and is a voluntary association of
              organisations that provide and support free access to the law.
            </p>
            <p>
              Laws.Africa is proud to be a part of this world-wide association of like-minded organisations.
            </p>

            <h3 id="sect-6_sub-sect-2">Advisory Board</h3>
            <p>
              We’re proud to announce the four members of the inaugural Laws.Africa Advisory Board. They bring a broad range of experience and expertise, and a diversity of backgrounds, to assist Laws.Africa with its mission of improving access to African law. The four members are:
            </p>

            <ul>
              <li>Vidhu Vedalankar</li>
              <li>Ndidi Ezenwa</li>
              <li>Justice Isaac Lenaola</li>
              <li>Robert Buergenthal</li>
            </ul>

            <p>
              We are very grateful to them for committing their time and expertise to assist us, and are looking forward
              to the input that they will bring to our activities.
            </p>
            <div class="callout-box">
              Lorem Callout
<!--              <div>-->
<!--                <q>Read more about our new advisory board members</q>-->
<!--              </div>-->
            </div>
          </section>
        </article>
      </div>
    </div>
  </div>
</div>

<script type="text/javascript">
  document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", function () {
    {
      var ulElement = document.querySelector('.annual-report-topic-list');
      var topicsNodes = document.querySelectorAll("[data-tocify='#toc'] h2");
      for (let i = 0; i < topicsNodes.length; i++) {
        var liElement = document.createElement('li');
        liElement.classList.add('annual-report-topic-list__item');
        var anchorElement = document.createElement('a');
        anchorElement.classList.add('h4');
        anchorElement.href = "#" + topicsNodes[i].id;
        anchorElement.innerText = topicsNodes[i].innerText;
        var bulletElement = document.createElement('div');
        bulletElement.classList.add('annual-report-topic-list__item__marker');
        liElement.append(bulletElement, anchorElement);
        ulElement.appendChild(liElement);
      }
    }
  });
</script>