Great to hear. I haven't looked into the project fully, so I'll apologize in advance if you already have a solution for what I describe below.
I used a catch all DNS wildcard with a dnsmasq rule which I set up on a DD-WRT flashed router.
address=/#/192.168.11.2
That IP was the IP of my server. The nice part of that rule is that many people will type in google.com or something similar when they find your open wifi spot assuming they are connected to the web. The wildcard will resolve that the the IP of the local server and send them there automatically. That can be the landing page of the network that introduces things, provides links etc.
We ended up using an mDNS (http://www.avahi.org/) that pointed towards hostname.local - not perfect, but we didn't have to use the IP address anymore. The catch all is a much better idea.
Not trying to "use" Africa. Just trying to make something that could help people. The description is a little rough but I truly believe that once we start talking with the groups that have specific requirements for each region, these devices could do some good.
To be honest, we don't. We really do want to work with the people who do know though. Obviously some of the stuff we included for v1 doesn't make sense for certain regions, and we want to address this before any major deployment.
There's a mediawiki project called Afripédia [0] whose goal is kind of similar: put the whole wikipedia on a drive and install it on a pogoplug in multiple places in french-speaking African countries where accessibility is close to nil.
On the technical side they "only" have a wikipedia dump for the moment, but on the project side they have had some success in deploying it, so maybe you can have a look at what they do (warning: Afripédia is made by and for french-speaking people, you may have to learn it :)
