This project attempts to address a basic problem for all scholarship on Africa that treats where things happen as necessary to understanding how and why they happen: finding places on a map. Despite the existence of excellent public maps for Africa, to date there is no common source that allows students, researchers, and the general public to:

• Interact with the best available public data for Africa
• See the whole of Africa yet also zoom in to particular places
• Accumulate both contemporary and historical data supplied by researchers and make it permanently accessible online
• Work collaboratively across disciplines and organizations with spatial information about Africa in an online environment