Niger:
It has been awfully quiet around mapping these west- african states recently. About a year ago I called the community for help in mapping Niamey- the capital of Niger. The community responded beautifully. Look at the Map now:

osm.org/?lat=13.5257&lon=2.1124&zoom=13&layers=M

We can be very proud of the results.

As most of you know by now we recently got permission to trace over the bing imagery. It seems to be a bit more up to date than the yahoo stuff, so knock yourself out if you got some spare time and do some armchair mapping. Unfortunately Niamey is the only area of Niger where hires imagery exists, so we can only do so much (public domain vmap0 street data and geonameserver have allready been imported by us)

Mali:
Also about a year ago I wrote here:
"I recently got a "call to arms" from some guys from geekcorps.org and other NGOs with an interest in mapping Mali. The bad thing is that there is NO high resolution Yahoo imagery available, the good thing is that at least some GPSses seem to exist in Mali since there are some GPS tracks already uploaded."

I was able to rectify an old public domain map of Bamako - the capital of Mali - and traced over that. Also this summer an NGO- worker brought his GPS when he went to Bamako, so we had some genuine grassroots mapping going on over there. With the Bing imagery we now have an excellent source for tracing ways.

Bamako:
osm.org/?lat=12.6275&lon=-7.9997&zoom=13&layers=M

Another place in Mali that got hires imagery is Tombouctou. This ancient town lied at the intersection of trans saharan trade routes and was once a prosperous city with universities etc. Now it seems to be just another small town at the edge of the sahara. Nevertheless- a very interesting place to map.

Map:
osm.org/?lat=16.7604&lon=-2.9903&zoom=12&layers=M
wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timbuktu