Hi Tom,
Sorry for coming late into this thread, but I hope that I'll be able to clear up some of the questions surrounding eBird! As a brief introduction, I'm the eBird Project Assistant, and am happy to help anybody out with any questions or concerns involving any aspect of eBird.
When you entered your data for Sudan, you mentioned having species that came up as "notable" for the region – where you were asked for more details. The reason for this happening is to keep data quality as high as possible, with more info in this article:
http://help.ebird.org/customer/port...ing-the-ebird-review-and-data-quality-process. You said some of the species were "flagged" that shouldn't be, and that is due to the low levels of involvement in Sudan – our current data quality filters there could use a little bit more refinement, but should soon be more accurate once more data are submitted from the region!
As others have said before (thanks Neils!), you can use the 1 Jan 1900 method to upload your life list, allowing you to get the numbers on eBird up to date. If you do have accurate date and location information, then it is always better to have those records in as opposed to the life list method, but either can work! For Kenya, you mention not being able to find certain regions, and I hope I can help with that. We have all 9 provinces in Kenya in eBird (Coast; Eastern; Central; Western; Nairobi; Nyanza; and North-Eastern), and you are also able to choose any of the 331 existing "hotspots" in Kenya, or plot your own location on a map. I'll send you a private message after this post as well to try to help with this more.
In addition to manually entering each checklist, you can also upload large spreadsheets of data into eBird. This allows you to upload hundreds or thousands of observations at once, which can save quite a bit of time! More information on importing data can be found here:
http://help.ebird.org/customer/portal/articles/973915-uploading-data-to-ebird
I think that eBird could serve all of the purposes that you need, at no cost, while at the same time helping out science, conservation, and worldwide public birding knowledge. Many of the options suggested above have export functions to eBird, so even the final decision settles on something else, hopefully your data will still find their way into eBird!
Best,
Ian Davies
http://ebird.org/content/ebird/