Marefa Foundation

Marefa is a non-profit project for create an Arabic-language modern cultural space, online, that promote science and knowledge as basis for tolerance. It was established in February 16 2007 as an Arabic-language open free online encyclopedia. It attracts researchers and donors of old manuscripts. It currently includes more than 130,000 articles 400,000 files, 2.4 million pages of old manuscripts, and 25,000 Arabic books available for download, for free –all out of copyright. Marefa may expand into other languages.

Marefa partners with the Library of Congress, Digital library of India, and the Million Book Project (US-India-China), and UNESCO digital library.

Marefa seeks funding by the following

First: Running online ads

Second: Applying for cultural awards

Third: Selling online, printed audio and video cultural content, such as offering subject-specific Marefa content in the form of printed, audio and electronic books.

Fourth: Offering subscription-based content, in specific fields, such as Energy news bulletin, Telecom, etc.

Fifth: Offering hosting and cloud computing services, similar to Amazon AWS

Sixth: May sell big data services, such as marketing information, based on the clientele of Marefa