Up-to-date information on biodiversity is critical for the proper management and conservation of any area. Thus, the first step towards conservation should be to compile a species inventory or checklist. Despite their obvious value, very few complete inventories exist for most continents or mega-regions of the world, with Africa being no exception. Here we report on the African Plant Checklist and Database Project, which provides botanists with the first-ever inventory and database for the flowering plants of sub-Saharan Africa. This valuable resource is available online at http://www. ville-ge.ch/cjb/bd/africa. The project, for the first time, gives accurate statistics for the angiosperm flora of sub-Saharan Africa, comprising just over 50 000 flowering plant taxa and representing approximately 44 830 species. Furthermore, by pointing out problems and discrepancies in taxonomic opinion, the checklist highlights genera and species complexes where further research is necessary. The inventory and database will not only be an invaluable tool for botanists working on the African flora, the combination will also serve most other biological disciplines. Conservationists, amateur biologists and enthusiasts, amongst others, will benefit from the outputs of this exercise. Furthermore, it has a key role to play in other projects and is proposed as a nomenclatural standard facilitating future botanical work on the continent, such as the African Plants Initiative.