Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/African & Proud General Support.

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Applicant details

Wikimedia username(s):

B.Korlah

Edriiic

Organization:

African & Proud (archived)

G. Have you received grants from the Wikimedia Foundation before?

Applied previously and did receive a grant

H. Have you received grants from any non-wiki organization before?

No

H.1 Which organization(s) did you receive grants from?

N/A

M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?

Yes

M1. Fiscal organization name.

Kiwix

Additional information

R. Where will this proposal be implemented?

Nigeria

S. Please indicate whether your work will be focused on one country (local), more than one or several countries in your region (regional) or has a cross-regional (global) scope:

Local

S1. If you have answered regional or international, please write the country names and any other information that is useful for understanding your proposal.

T. If you would like, please share any websites or social media accounts that your group or organization has. (optional)

Website: https://www.africanandproud.org/

Linkedln: https://www.linkedin.com/company/african-proud/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/proudlyafro/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/african_proud1

M. Do you have a fiscal sponsor?

Yes

M1. Fiscal organization name.

Kiwix

Proposal

1. What is the overall vision of your organization and how does this proposal contribute to this? How does this proposal connect to past work and learning?

African & Proud (AP) is committed to preserving and promoting Africa’s rich cultural heritage through African culture, festivals, cuisines, quotes, language, and various African-related information/content while also contributing to global free knowledge on the world’s largest free encyclopedia; Wikipedia, and her sister projects.

2. What is the change that you are trying to bring about and why is this important?

Challenges:

Wikipedia and its sister project being the massive community library, some things can’t be found which are identified as gaps, and the biggest gap of all is Sub-Sahara Africa where most of the information are out of date, missing, skewed and entries are often incomplete. The following is a list of challenges in African heritage information on Wikimedia projects:

1. Knowledge gap (especially on Local Language Wikipedia): There is a substantial lack of African-related information on the Wikimedia project and research on the importance of creating relatable content that reflects the reader's cultural viewpoints and perspective shows that it will make the reader more likely to contribute content and return to the knowledge platform. This also shows a point that few readers and potential contributors will most likely not return to knowledge platforms due to the lack of recognizable experiences and perspectives that are keen on their culture, things that affect them from everyday life to the big issues which are underrepresented on Wikimedia projects. This problem statement is made from the ITU stats that shows Africa has double the population of Europe, but the total number of Africa-related articles amounts to 15% of Europe’s articles.

2. Low Community Development: There is a lack of youth development programs that promote capacity building in their professional/career life. Low community development is evident because there is little or no project in Nigeria covering that gap. There is no literal data to show this, but it is evident in our community.

3. Wikimedia Project as an unreliable source of information: Students have always been told to avoid Wikipedia because it is an unreliable source and this is very misleading as a lot of students now avoid making use of Wikipedia as a learning and research tool. (see here:https://blogs.cornell.edu/info2040/2021/11/04/wikipedia-an-unreliable-source/) . 4. Low online-learning resources: There is a substantial lack of online learning resources on how Wikimedia projects can be edited, especially for new editors and readers.

5. Low motivation: According to research carried out by us sampling different persons in Nigeria, it is observed that what motivates them to contribute to this free knowledge is their ‘desire to preserve and promote their languages and culture and a commitment to open access and open education.

Proposed Solutions:

1. Content Creation: To bridge the knowledge gap around various content, we will organize various contests and editathon to help bridge the gap around content creation. This editathon would be done in the various language Wikipedia present in Nigeria; Igbo Wikipedia, Yoruba Wikipedia, and English Wikipedia.

2. We will develop our community through capacity building, training, awareness, post-community development, skill building, and collaboration.

3. Promotion of Wikipedia as a reliable source of information to high school students would further change the wrong notion that has been introduced to the student, and instead of telling students not to use Wikipedia for academic research, we will rather promote Wikipedia as a reliable source of information while also teaching them how to use and contribute to it.

4. Development of an open-source LMS: Creating a digitalization video learning resources and developing an open-source LMS website (under African & Proud) where training materials on how to edit across Wikimedia projects can be found, this is to further assist new learners to know how to edit Wikipedia and sister projects

5. African & Proud will tap into the desires of Nigerians (and Africans at large) to share their language and cultures since studies have shown that this is a strong motivator for Wikipedians from underrepresented populations.

3. Describe your main approaches or strategies to achieve these changes and why you think they will be effective.

- Promotion of African-Related content in Wikipedia and sister projects: This would be achieved by organizing training and Editathons relating to African content to further showcase our pride in African culture, cuisines, diversity, etc (starting with Nigeria). This will also be done on Languange projects (including the Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa Wikipedia) to strengthen diversity.

Promote the use and contribution to Wikibook Cookbooks, which is a project that is generally underused in Nigeria, this would be done through training (physical and virtual), and training videos would be uploaded on LMS as a free resource that anyone can access to help them know how to edit Wikibook.

Provide an avenue for a young professional to come together for collaboration, capacity building, skill sharing, discourse around Wikimedia Projects, Training & Editathon, and project management and organizational skills.

Promote the use of Wikipedia as a reliable source of information in African schools, a pilot project has been done and this will further build on it.

Soft skills development; capacity building in areas of Entrepreneurial Leadership(using Wikipedia as a source) will equip fellows/participants with skills for leading self, leading/collaborating with others, leading projects, and leading change in systems and their society.

Partnership with organizations, institutions, and persons involved in African Festivals, Cuisines, and diversity to further showcase & promote it on the Wikimedia projects

Digital Upskilling - Participants will be taught basic MS Office, Project Management, and LinkedIn optimization for better networking (social media communication work. This will also equip fellows with skills for using workplace production and collaboration tools such as the MS Office Suite, other project tools, and social media networking such as optimization of their LinkedIn profile creating an opportunity for social media communication

Recruiting more editors and formation of new Wikimedia Fan Clubs

4. What are the activities you will be developing and delivering as part of these approaches or strategies?

● “AfroYanga 1.0 / (Physical 5-day capacity Bootcamp hosted in Nigeria)”: With participants from different states in Nigeria - A Bootcamp session centred around capacity building, complete training on the Wikimedia Projects; featuring networking, connection, capacity building, soft skills, etc. This Bootcamp aims to bring people from diverse backgrounds and cultures coming together with one thing in common; Editing on Wikimedia Foundation projects; there will also be guest speakers (e.g., Young professionals and entrepreneurs). The participants will have capacity building on both the Wikimedia Foundation projects and soft skills such as; Facilitation (+6 Hats) & Need Mapping, Emotional Intelligence, and Proactivity, and building a good Linkedin profile (basic digital skills) making use of Wikipedia as a tool for the resource. Each participant will get a certificate of participation afterward and will also be onboarded as an Afroyanga Fellow.

● “AfroCuisine (Physical Edit-a-thon in Nigeria)” - Documentation of Nigerian Cuisines and to further show the cuisines, We intend to partner with Cuisine-related bodies in Nigeria. We will use the ISA tools to run an ISA campaign co-run by WIA (Wiki In Africa) and African & Proud on the theme of cuisine.

5. Do you want to apply for multi-year funding?

No

5.1 If yes, provide a brief overview of Year 2 and Year 3 of the proposed plan and how this relates to the current proposal and your strategic plan?

N/A

6. Please include a timeline (operational calendar) for your proposal.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1QUvHJwxnojDwUuhvkICWjYWQVa7WttK7ePsWXltwVlI/edit?usp=sharing

7. Do you have the team that is needed to implement this proposal?

1. Name: Kolawole Oyewole Username: B.Korlah Role: Co-Founder Core Responsibility: He oversees the financial accounts and creates financial reports regarding the organization. He is also responsible for on-wiki communications, strategy, staff support, jury management, and project rollout. General Responsibility: General management, coordination, and design of Africa & Proud programs, staff, volunteers, and coordination of all activities.

2. Name: Richard izuchukwu Edozie Username: Edriiic Role: Co-Founder Core Responsibilities: He oversees procurements, and payments and generates the annual report in terms of organization. Also responsible for strategy, tech development, and brand management. General Responsibility: General management, coordination, and design of Africa & Proud programs, staff, volunteers, and coordination of all activities.

3. Name: Yet to be filled‎ Role: African & Proud Administrative assistant (volunteer) Responsibility: He/She is responsible for supporting the co-founders and staff, assisting with daily needs, and managing the organization’s general administrative activities. Organizationally he/she will act as the point of contact for internal and external persons, answering and direct phone calls.

4. Name: Yet to be filled Role: Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) Officer (Contractor) Responsibility: The Monitoring. and Evaluation (M&E) officer will be responsible for the project's design, coordination, and implementation of the monitoring and evaluation, research and learning framework.

8. Please state if your proposal aims to work to bridge any of the identified CONTENT knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select up to THREE that most apply to your work.

Geography, Language, Cultural background, ethnicity, religion, racial

8.1 In a few sentences, explain how your work is specifically addressing this content gap (or Knowledge inequity) to ensure a greater representation of knowledge.

Most of the projects proposed by African & Proud address content on different Wikimedia projects, the AfroCuisine will address the content gap on Nigeria Cuisine on Wikibook Cookbook, and Wikipedia and also use Wiki Commons photos to improve cuisine article pages both on Wikibook Cookbook and Wikipedia.

9. Please state if your proposal includes any of these areas or THEMATIC focus. Select up to THREE that most apply to your work and explain the rationale for identifying these themes.

Education, Culture, heritage or GLAM , Diversity

10. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Please note, we had previously asked about inclusion and diversity in terms of CONTENTS, in this question we are asking about the diversity of PARTICIPANTS. Select up to THREE that most apply to your work.

Linguistic / Language, Geographic , Digital Access

11. What are your strategies for engaging participants, particularly those that currently are non-Wikimedia?

- Peer to peer learning: We intend to create a peer to peer learning platform to assist in engaging participants especially those who are non-Wikimedia, with this learning, People would support each other through the learning process. Every participant for each of our projects would be administered into the fellows group and this would further aid the peer to peer learning system and ultimately keep them engaged and abreast of the community activity.

Volunteers Involvement: People that want to volunteer and support the organization would be able to reach out to us via contact details made available on all our pages and projects meta pages. Call for volunteers would be announced in local communities group for every project being implemented.

All participants would be added to the African & Proud mailing list where they can get first-hand information about things happening in the organization and the Wikimedia Foundation.

12. In what ways are you actively seeking to contribute towards creating a safer, supportive, more equitable environment for participants and promoting the UCOC and Friendly Space Policy, and/or equivalent local policies and processes?

The UCOC and the Friendly Space Policy will be implemented in each event, meetup, workshop and competition that we will be organizing. After registering for any event, the UCOC and friendly policy would be sent out to all participants and during virtual events, we would have volunteers who would serve as Safety officers to checkmate every activity to ensure a safe, supportive and more equitable environment for all participants.

13. Do you have plans to work with Wikimedia communities, groups, or affiliates in your country, or in other countries, to implement this proposal?

Yes

13.1 If yes, please tell us about these connections online and offline and how you have let Wikimedia communities know about this proposal.

- Wikimedia Nigeria: We have contacted the Wikimedia Nigeria user group and had a conversation about our project. The project has also been announced on the Wikimedia Nigeria discussion page.

Wikimedia Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa user groups: These Wikimedia user groups will be collaborated with during AfroCusine for article translation and creation of articles relating to cuisine

Announcements: The project will be announced on the Wikiproject Nigeria discussion pages, and the African Wikimedians telegram group.

Wiki in Africa: We had a discussion with Florence and Ceslause of Wiki in Africa on the possibilities of working together (especially on future projects that are outside Nigeria), we also plan on making use of their ISA tools in running an ISA campaign co-run by WIA and African & Proud on the theme of AfroCuisine during the AfroCuisine program. There was also a discussion on the future development of an education project, which is running on Vikidia and Wikimedia Commons.

14. Will you be working with other external, non-Wikimedian partners to implement this proposal?

Yes

14.1 Please describe these partnerships and what motivates the potential partner to be part of the proposal and how they add value to your work.

- We will be working with the young professional association of Nigeria and the Wikimedia Nigeria communities.

We will also partner with PDO - Don Bosco (Project & Development Office, Salesians of Don Bosco), a mission-aligned organization. They would partner with us on capacity-building activities, campaigns and awareness programs.

15. How do you hope to sustain or expand the work carried out in this proposal after the grant?

African & Proud mission has always been to scale and extend our spread beyond Nigeria and extend to other African countries, learnings from this first project (Nigeria) would help to further continue the word and extend our spread beyond Nigeria, which has also been in the pipeline as a result of the strategic partnerships we have formed.

16. What kind of risks do you anticipate and how would you mitigate these. This can include factors such as external/contextual issues that may affect implementation, as well as internal issues, such as governance/leadership changes.

In organizing Afroyanga which includes Youth, we have anticipated the youth risk and in mitigating this, we have gone through the National Youth Policy, we can confirm our full compliance with the laws of engaging the youths.

The proposal demonstrates how they will ensure the safe engagement of young people in all of the project’s activities.

17. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select a maximum of three options that most apply.

Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement, Invest in Skills and Leadership Development, Innovate in Free Knowledge

18. Please state if your organization or group has a Strategic Plan that can help us further understand your proposal. You can also upload it here.

No

Learning, Sharing, and Evaluation

19. What do you hope to learn from your work in this fund proposal?

1. What challenges do Africans(Nigerians) face in editing Wikipedia and sister projects 2. What keeps new participants engaged after the end of an editathon 3. What training mode do participants prefer the most 4. What is the impact of post-event mentorship 5. How does capacity building shape a young professional 6. Why are some students misinformed about Wikipedia? 7. Why are students usually told that Wikipedia is not a reliable source of information 8. What is the best approach to actually train people, and get feedback (before and after training) 10. What motivates people to participate in Wikimedia projects (especially in the underrepresented region)?

20. Based on these learning questions, what is the information or data you need to collect to answer these questions? Please register this information (as metric description) in the following space provided.


Main Metrics	Description	Target
Number of Participants	Afroyanga - 10 participants AfroCuisine - at least 70 participants (30 participants during the physical edit-a-thon, and at least 40 participants would join the event remotely) Other (social media reach) - at least 50 participants	130
Number of Editors	This will include editors who will participate in contest and writing	130
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A

Here are some additional metrics that you can use if they are relevant to your work. Please note that this is just an optional list, mostly of quantitative metrics. They may complement the qualitative metrics you have defined in the previous boxes.


Additional Metrics	Description	Target
Number of editors that continue to participate/retained after activities	At least 25% of participants would be retained after activities. They will be inducted into the mentorship program.	33
Number of organizers that continue to participate/retained after activities	N/A	N/A
Number of strategic partnerships that contribute to longer term growth, diversity and sustainability	Strategic partnership with Wiki-in-Africa, AFROCROWD, Wikimedia Nigeria.	3
Feedback from participants on effective strategies for attracting and retaining contributors	Strategic monitoring, evaluation and learning surveys carried out at the start of each project, at the end of the project and 3-months after the end of each project to monitor participant's feedback on things that can be done better, added or removed which will lead to the attracting and retaining of contributors.	10
Diversity of participants brought in by grantees	Participants for all events would be spread across all diverse groups in Nigeria (Igbo, Hausa and Yoruba)	3
Number of people reached through social media publications	Social media advertisements and publications about all of our projects (At least 500 impressions from our online advertisement // At least 2.35% conversion rate)	12
Number of activities developed	At least 2 distinct activities will be developed	2
Number of volunteer hours	African & Proud Administrative assistant (Yet to be filled‎ Role); He/She is responsible for supporting the co-founders and staff, assisting with daily needs, and managing the organization’s general administrative activities. Organizationally he/she will act as the point of contact for internal and external persons, answering and directing phone calls.	1

21. Additional core quantitative metrics. These core metrics will not tell the whole story about your work, but they are important for measuring some Movement-wide changes. Please try to include these core metrics if they are relevant to your work. If they are not, please use the space provided to explain why they are not relevant or why you can not capture this data. Your explanation will help us review our core metrics and make sure we are using the best ones for the movement as a whole.

Core Metrics Summary
Core metrics	Description	Target
Number of participants	Afroyanga - 10 participants AfroCuisine - at least 70 participants (30 participants during the physical edit-a-thon, and at least 40 participants would join the event remotely) Other (social media reach) - at least 50 participants	130
Number of editors	This will include editors who will participate in contest and writing	200
Number of organizers	N/A	N/A

**Number of new content contributions per Wikimedia project**
Wikimedia Project	Description	Target
Wikipedia	(English Wikipedia) Number of articles created/improved - 350 // (Igbo Wikipedia) Number of articles created/translated/improved - 300 // (Yoruba Wikipedia) Number of articles created/translated/improved - 350	1000
Wikibooks	Specifically on the cookbooks of Wikibooks	500
Wikimedia Commons	Adding photos on cuisines on Wikimedia Commons	500
Wikipedia	N/A	N/A
N/A	N/A	N/A

21.1 If for some reason your proposal will not measure these core metrics please provide an explanation.

N/A

22. What tools would you use to measure each metric selected?

- Wikimedia Outreach Dashboard tool - (https://outreachdashboard.wmflabs.org/)

Hashtag tool (https://hashtags.wmflabs.org/)

X tools (https://xtools.wmflabs.org/)

ISA tool

Financial Proposal

23. & 23.1 What is the amount you are requesting from WMF? Please provide this amount in your local currency. If you are thinking about a multi-year fund, please provide the amount for the first year.

8842960 NGN

23.2 What is this amount in US Currency (to the best of your knowledge)?

20000 USD

23.3 Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it.

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1PwV8gpglInT665kelbLGtapYcfu89b7b/edit#gid=1317624397

23.4 Please include any additional observations or comments you would like to include about your budget.

The budget was carefully prepared to reflect all the key investments needed to achieve results. All finances were adequately accounted for.

Please use this optional space to upload any documents that you feel are important for further understanding your proposal.

Final Message

By submitting your proposal/funding request you agree that you are in agreement with the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and the Universal Code of Conduct.

We/I have read the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy and Universal Code of Conduct.

Yes

Feedback

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