The catalogue of Life (CoL ) is a comprehensive and authoritative global index of species names, including scientific names (valid and synonyms) as well as Common names. It is composed of so called Global Species Databases (GSDs) groups per major taxa and currently services names for over 1.5 Mio species. The Catalogue of life serves as a reference for species names, checking and validation tool for major initiatives like the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF ), the Ecyclopidia of Life (EoL ) or the Barcode of life (BOL ), but is also used in this regard by individual institutions or researchers. The Royal Museum for Central Africa is providing names of African species to the Catalogue of life, notably the African hub of Fishbase and the Lepidoptera group Gracillariidae . Additionally the museum uses the catalogue of Life as cross reference tool to check the scientific names of their collections and those of their African partners. The yearly updated Catalogue of Life is imported in the vertebrate database to update the current names for example. Via an Excel macro the data provided by the African partners selected by the digitalization call of the project CABIN (Central African Biodiversity Information Network, funded by the Belgian Cooperation),the scientific names are checked against the Catalogue of Life. More recently in the framework of the implementation of the new collection management system DARWIN, the scientific names of imported datasets are cross checked against the Catalogue of Life and the GBIF name service. During these activities it was noticed that quite a few African taxa are not present in the CoL and if not with an updated synonymy. Local African Common Names are rare in the CoL. The African museum manages quite a few databases including Scientific and Common names and would so be a good candidate to initiate the setting up of an African CoL hub to enrich the system with African species Name. Active all over Africa and beyond, the main focus of the museum is Central Africa, it goes thus without saying that such an initiative has to be a collective initiatives with Belgian, European, African, US and other international partners active in African Biodiversity and managing collections originating from this continent. The objective of this talk at the CoL Global meeting is to give an overview of the possible contribution on African Species Names, to initiate a call for interest and contribution to an African hub worldwide, to agree on a workflow and infrastructure for the African hub, to coordinate an large scale gap and quality analyze on the current version of the Catalogue of Life for available African species and last but not least to jointly elaborate a funding strategy and identify potential financing sources to make this ambitious project come true. http://www.catalogueoflife.org/ http://www.gbif.org/ http://eol.org/ http://www.barcodeoflife.org/ http://www.fishbase.org/ http://www.gracillariidae.net/ http://www.africamuseum.be/museum/collections/browsecollections/naturalsciences/index_html