The following is an excerpt from the new OLI white paper, Beyond the Binary: The Power of Offline Internet, September 2024.
Kiwix is a charitable organization that runs a free open-source software initiative aimed at enabling offline access to educational materials, with a particular emphasis on Wikipedia and similar Wikimedia projects.
A software that creates ultra-compressed versions of whole websites, stored as a single (.zim) file, Kiwix functions like an ordinary browser, but it accesses these local copies instead of the internet. Zim files are compact enough to be saved on mobile devices, PCs, or affordable hotspots. Even without internet access or with limited connectivity, users can browse as if they were online.
Both the software and the content are open-source and free for use and distribution. Kiwix is so prolific that it is impossible to fully measure their impact.
While they report that in the first two months of 2024 they had upwards of 10 million zim file downloads, the ability to share content peer to peer means there is no way to trace how widely downloaded content is being shared.
There are a diverse array of users that rely on Kiwix for access to relevant digital information—in prisons, for example—demonstrating the need for and wide usage of software like Kiwix, while also demonstrating the difficulty of quantifying the impact.
Still, plenty of users share their stories of Kiwix, like Daniel, a medical student in the Democratic Republic of Congo who used Kiwix to support their education by being able to access Wikipedia medical articles offline. Given the cost of data in his country, being able to access educational resources offline, and without data charges, makes education affordable.