Since its conception in 1987 by Rainer Froese and Daniel Pauly, FishBase has become the largest online platform on fishes in the world, currently with information on more than 35.000 species and around 500.000 unique users every month. After an initial period of financing by the European Union, a FishBase Consortium was founded in 2001 to consolidate the further development of FishBase. The consortium originally consisted of seven renowned institutes, but is currently managed by 13. The Royal Museum for Central Africa (RMCA) in Tervuren, Belgium, is one of the founding members of the consortium and responsible for the data on African fresh and brackish water fishes. The cooperation between FishBase and the RMCA started already in 1997 with the digitisation of the large fish collection of the RMCA, containing an estimated one million African fishes. In 2001, this cooperation intensified with the RMCA s contribution now also including the checking and updating of relevant information on African fishes in FishBase, based on published literature. In 2005, the RMCA added to its FishBase contribution the organisation of an annual training session for five African scientists, alternately in English and French, from which up to now a total of 90 scientists from 22 countries have benefitted. The training component was complemented with a follow-up program of one month since 2009 and the organisation of several local training sessions, organised in Africa by former training alumni. The website www.fishbaseforafrica.org was launched in 2013 as a subset of FishBase, containing Africa related news items and data. Other outputs of the FishBase programme at the RMCA include an identification guide to the African Clupeiformes, the development of AfriBasins and the production of DVD versions of FishBase for offline usage.