Impact of open access to law in Africa
Studies and publications
The Impact of Free Access to Law Studies 2026
What open legal information costs, and what it changes: the evidence from Tanzania.
Two studies sit behind this page, both commissioned under the German Development Cooperation's GIZ PRoLA programme.
Justice in Data, prepared by ALT Advisory, is an independent impact evaluation of TanzLII — built on a near-complete national corpus of citation data, a sector-wide survey, interviews at every level of the courts, and a full cost analysis, assessed against the OECD-DAC criteria.
Impact of Digital Legal Infrastructure on Economic Development and Governance, prepared by HiiL across Tanzania, Kenya, South Africa, France and the United Kingdom, traces how open legal data reaches small businesses, investors, women and the justice innovation ecosystem, and sets out the institutional and financing pathways available to governments building it.
Together they answer two questions this field has long asserted but rarely shown: what this infrastructure costs, and what it changes.
Justice in Data: Measuring the Impact of Digital Access to Law in Tanzania
An impact evaluation of development assistance for legal information infrastructure.
Report by alt.advisory. July 2026
Impact of Digital Legal Infrastructure on Economic Development and Governance
Thoughtfully crafted to elevate what matters most.
Impact of access to digital law in Africa
A study of the Legal Information Institutes in Africa (LIIs) (2020)
Impact de l'accès au droit numérique
Résumé de l’étude des Instituts d'information juridique d'Afrique subsaharienne (« LII »)(2020)
Previous studies on the impact of open access to legal information in Africa
-
![]()
The state of African Legal Information Institutes (2019)
A study on the state of African Legal Information Institutes was carried out by MySociety in 2019, on the invitation of project funder Indigo Trust. The study asked ‘how free access to law online is shaping justice in sub-Saharan Africa’.
”The research identified clear, positive impacts resulting from the existence and use of the LIIs, most notably in South Africa, where the LII proved to be a key tool in increasing access to the legal profession for economically disadvantaged groups. Across the countries studied, the LIIs were also benefiting the development of high quality domestic case law, which had been underdeveloped prior to digitisation; and were considered to be useful tools for citizens in developing a more meaningful understanding of the law.” -
![]()
Ethnographic Research on the Impact of Legal Information Institutes in Zimbabwe and South Africa (2018)
In 2018 the Southern African Institute for Policy and Research (SAIPAR) published report titled: Ethnographic Research on the Impact of Legal Information Institutes in Zimbabwe and South Africa.
The report was commissioned by the Open Society Foundations, following an evaluation that advised AfricanLII to provide more evidence of the impact of the LIIs on society, and thus to improve its fundraising capabilities.
This report provides clear evidence of the positive impact of the LIIs on the judiciary, lawyers, students and communities in South Africa and Zimbabwe, in urban as well as rural areas.
