Grants:Simple/Applications/Open Foundation West Africa/2020-2021

Application or grant stage: Approved

Applicant or grantee: Open Foundation West Africa

Amount requested: 110,413.11 USD

Amount granted: 110,413.11 USD (+10% contingency reallocation)

Funding period: 1 October 2020 - 31 December 2021

Midpoint report due: 1 May 2021

Final report due: 30 January 2022

Background

Staffing Plan

OFWA Staff Plan

Budget Plan

OFWA Budget Plan 2020/2021

Our participation and engagement with the SAPG Program in the past years, has strengthened our activities and streamlined our area of expertise. This growing consciousness has clearly created a path for growth and has helped us stipulate our priority areas which continue to shape our activities. Our experience and work in these past year(s) has enabled us to adopt diverse strategies which ensure a strengthened collaboration with our partners and community to achieve our strategic priorities.

Our projects are categorised along specific strategic lines to ensure consistency and alignment of our organisation's objectives:

• Capacity Building and Community Development
• GLAM & Content Creation
• Wikip(m)edia in Education
• Tech and Community Support.
• Advocacy & Awareness

The COVID-19 pandemic left almost no stone unturned as our activities and plans were paused following the directive of the Wikimedia Foundation. The horrendous occurrences put a hold on in person activities which led to the postponement of some of our activities intended for the 2019/2020 fiscal year to the 2020/2021 fiscal year. Such activities have however been repeated in our current grant request to ensure completion.  

The addition of a new staff capacity coupled with an office space has offered our community the opportunity to attain additional support outside the usual monthly meetup schedules. These substantive additions (staff capacity and office space) have increased our support for the community and eased access to space for community convenings (to easily walk-in and access the internet for contributions). Not only that, it has also helped strengthen the relationship we have with our partners and increased their confidence in what we do and even more so created visibility for our work. We have had many potential partners and contributors this past year walk into our office to learn about what we do and participated in our activities. We had the honour to host a couple of visiting Wikimedians who reside outside Ghana and a few more members from the larger Wikimedia community in Ghana.

At OFWA we believe in people's support as volunteerism is at the heart of all the work we do. Based on this philosophy we have developed a meritociticsation system to award active and exceptional contributors, this we believe is highlighting the value we place on member contributions and has heightened the need for dedication and commitment from our community. The adoption of the dashboard to fully track performance allows us to commend our best volunteers on our social media platforms and on our blog. We are also going to institute the “Wikipedian of The Year Award” (a local version) at our annual general meeting this year and in subsequent years. The establishment of the coaching system within our organisation has also improved activity levels and has clearly surged our content creation by about 40% and increased activity levels of previously dormant members. However, for the year 2020 due to the pandemic, instead of hosting  the usual Annual General Meeting with our partners and community members, we intend to show appreciation to them by sending gift souvenirs during the festive season to active contributors and some partners.

This year, our approach is to continue to strengthen the relationship we have with the media houses, language institutions and general work around education. There will be a lot of focus this year around capacity building for our communities as we believe these contributors must stay for all the gains they make in their personal and professional lives due to their affiliation with our organisation. Our lines of activities and programs will be developed along the core functional areas of our organisation as aforementioned. The various metrics and objectives of each of our targeted functional areas is explained below:

Programs

GLAM & Content Creation

The GLAM & Content Creation Program of OFWA focuses on opportunities that translate directly into content that improve Wikimedia projects. These contents are targeted at projecting the culture, history, natural heritage, scenic landscape, architecture, monumental structures and artifacts of the country. They are often presented in audiovisual formats and are used to complement already existing articles or aid in the creation of new articles. This program will be targeted at directly improving content on Wikimedia Commons and Wikipedia.

SMART GOALS

• The goal of this program is to create content that can be used to visualize articles from our country and (or) provide reference materials to improve the quality of articles that exist and newer ones through sources.
• In the next 3 years we want to become the beacon for GLAM in the subregion and to position our organisation to be a key stakeholder within the GLAM space, since it is still a growing space.
• We want to attain this goal through constant engagement and delivering projects in the GLAM field to showcase our capacity and ability to support such institutions.
• It is the right time to delve into the concept of GLAM since it's quite new and will provide us some credibility and an experienced label in the future when people become a lot more conversant with the phenomenon.
• We are looking at achieving the goal in this first year after which we will draw a blueprint of the direction we want to go.

Projects:

• Wiki Loves Earth
• Wiki Loves Festivals
• Wiki Loves Africa
• Africa Wiki Challenge
• Content Campaign Drives

Wiki Loves Earth (WLE)

Wiki Loves Earth (WLE) is an annual international photographic competition targeted at taking pictures of local natural heritage and scenic landscape in their countries, and upload them to Wikimedia Commons. We will be participating in the 2020 campaign to provide photos that can help to better illustrate articles on and about Ghana.

Objectives

• Add more images about the local natural heritage and scenic landscape.
• Improve articles by integrating these images in their related articles or creating articles for non-existing articles.
• Recruit and train new editors through the various photo expeditions, upload sessions and edit-a-thons.
• Engage existing editors to contribute to Commons and other sister projects.
• Create awareness about the Wikimedia movement and its activities in Ghana and beyond.

Wiki Loves Festivals (WLF)

We are looking at roping our colleagues and allies from far and near. It is with this vision that we have created a project page for the campaign with particular interest in scaling the campaign to other countries that are interested. We believe this will create relevance as festivals are a part of every country’s culture and will bridge general gaps around culture on Wikipedia. Festivals are an expressive way to celebrate glorious and sorrowful heritage, culture and traditions. This is important because not all GLAM content exists within GLAM institutions, some are found on our streets, homes, villages and places we often don't look to when talking about GLAM. However still important to share telling the complete story of a particular culture or people. In our bid to promote culture and heritage, we want to continue to run this project in Ghana, first to cover the different types of festivals in Ghana, and hopefully get other countries on-board in 2021. Objectives

• Add more images on Ghanaian culture and heritage through festivals.
• Improve articles on Ghanaian festivals on English Wikipedia and create new articles or translations in the local language Wikipedias ( Twi and Ga).
• Create awareness about Wikipedia and its sister projects as tools for promoting culture and heritage.
• Engage the community of existing contributors in Ghana to use this as an opportunity to contribute.

Wiki Loves Africa (WLAf)

We annually participate in the photo contest that projects the rich culture and heritage of the African people. We have participated in this campaign since its inception and contribute to the yearly theme through photowalks and expeditions. It has gradually become an opportunity to run awareness campaigns and to recruit towards our future projects. Our campaigns in the past have sourced more than a 100 unique uploaders who are not members of our community and through this campaign are able to reach out to their expertise. Through this campaign, we also maintain our partnerships with photowalk groups and professional photography networks.

Objectives

• Add more images about the theme of the campaign.
• Improve articles by integrating these images in their related articles or creating articles for non-existing articles.
• Recruit and train new editors through the various photo expeditions, upload sessions and edit-a-thons.
• Engage existing editors to contribute to Commons and other sister projects.
• Create awareness about the Wikimedia movement and its activities.

Africa Wiki Challenge (AWC)

The Africa Wiki Challenge (AWC) is a content campaign drive which targeted at bridging the African gap on Wikipedia and its sister projects. The campaign seeks to encourage Africans in the continent and the diaspora to contribute to content about Africa. Statistics from the Guardian 2013 indicated that out of the over 6 million articles that existed on the English Wikipedia, only about 2.6% was content about Africa and African related topics. Africa lags in terms of content on Wikipedia and most annual Wikimedia conferences organized both in Africa and outside Africa, from WikIndaba to Wikimania have sought various practical ways to deal with this gap. There have also been several calls on Africans to volunteer and document their history on the World's largest encyclopedia, Wikipedia. The AWC we believe is one of such ways to bridge this gap. It will help increase the number of Africans using and (or) contributing to the free knowledge to document their histories and culture.

Objectives

• Increase content about Africa on Wikipedia
• Work towards bridging the general African gap that exist
• Increase the visual representation of the continent on Wikipedia through images and videos
• Increase the number of Wikipedia contributors on the continent by providing online support and training for new editors
• Create awareness about the Wikimedia movement and its activities

Content Campaign Drives

Our content campaign drives are thematic drives to bridge content gaps that are a priority in the movement. Most of these gaps have its relevance based on the community in question. As a growing community, we often get introduced to institutions that are interested to leverage campaigns to encourage global participation on content around thematic topics such as gender, history, Afrofuturism, etc. Holding these campaigns often draw in new audiences and creates opportunities to collaborate with other like minded institutions to work towards these major content gaps on Wikipedia.

Objectives

• Encourage the participation of contributions remotely.
• Recruit and train new prospective editors virtually.
• Project the adaptation of wikimedia as a capacity building tool.

Wikip(m)edia in Education

These projects are primarily focussed on the application of Wikipedia and its sister projects in education. This involves activities centered around in-class assignments, clubs and societies and on campus events which inadvertently lead to contributions on Wikipedia and its sister projects through students, instructors, patrons, etc. within an academic setting. SMART GOALS

• The goal of this program is to present more opportunities within the education space in Ghana to ensure there are enough opportunities to create awareness and train more advocates within academia.
• We wish to grow more club activities within this year. We wish to increase our club presence by at least 20%.
• We intend to extend the activities of our regional hubs in schools and ensuring that our education programs receive local support to provide access to support and expertise.
• This program is important to us to help debank the narrative and help improve the image of Wikimedia within academia in Ghana.
• Its crucial for us to strengthen our existing partnerships and newly to be created partnerships with the university.

Projects:

• Summer Open School
• WikiClubs “X” Activities (where X stands for the name of the university Ashesi, Lancaster and UASS)

Summer Open School (SOS)

This was an event started in 2017 to train participants about the open movement and to encourage the contribution of participants (students) in at least one of the projects of their choice. It was also an open door for other Open Enthusiast/Contributors to learn about other Open Projects, they wish to contribute to. We also at the SOS train participants on the link between all these open projects and how work on one can benefit the rest. For example, convincing a school to start publishing with open access journals means we can freely begin to use such content on Wikipedia and even encourage the excitement around projects like WEP. This approach we believe interconnects and creates an overarching impact for our projects. We have annually run this event as a signature project and the one stop shop to promote cross-collaborations among the Open Movements, a subject that evolved from Wiki Indaba and projected to be the future of the Open Movement in Africa, especially because awareness is low and we believe it’s easier to convert an open enthusiast to join another open project. The event last year saw recruitments of more than 10 ambassadors who have gone back to their schools to host at least one event on their campuses or created partnerships to start hub in their regions. This project also opened doors to partnerships with several organisations such as tech-based organisation Soronko Academy, Lancaster University, OSM Community Ghana, Creative Commons Ghana, etc.

Objectives

• Extending the course of Wikimedia to all.
• Increasing cross collaboration amongst the Open Movement in Ghana.
• Recruit ambassador of Wikipedia and other sister projects to represent the affiliate in various regions where we are not yet present.
• Improve content on Wikimedia projects.

WikiClub “X” Activities

These are campus-based clubs that were spearheaded by Open Foundation West Africa and has been fully registered under the schools' bylaws and operational on their respective campuses. These are intended to promote the Education project as well as other interventions within the movement with a close supervision by Open Foundation West Africa. These clubs serve as a continuous platform or medium to engage students all year round. These clubs are critical because they continue to support students that are churned from the Education Programs of their respective schools. Students have the opportunity to meet with the club to learn more about other Wikimedia projects and to be encouraged through contests and competitions run by the club on campus. Their normal activities also serve as a recruitment opportunity for even students who don't take part in the Wikipedia Education Program on campus yet have the interest to join the club. Due to the diversity of students in Ghana (usually covering students from a lot of other African countries) we believe that lessons learnt could be taken back to their respective countries, to support existing or start new communities.

Objectives

• Extending the course of Wikimedia to students.
• Recruit and train new prospective editors.
• Complement the activities of the Education Program by providing additional support to students.
• Support new recruits all semesters of the year, since the Education Program only runs every other semester.

Advocacy & Awareness

OFWA has a very strong online and offline media presence. This program seeks to employ the services of our Communications & Community Engagement Coordinator to strengthen our presence both offline and online, as well as leverage our current visibility to draw in more partners and volunteers for our movement. We acknowledge that the space we work in is dynamic and to thrive we need to be flexible and spontaneous to breed innovation. Our program tries to dynamically address arising situations and issues that deserve our attention and proactiveness to ensure growth and achieve the innovation we need to exist. This also intends to address the needs and the struggles of our community to ensure they are adequately supported and to deepen our visibility or presence.

SMART GOALS

• The main goal is to create awareness about Wikimedia projects and help to change the narrative that exists about the platform.
• Educate at least 30 people on Wikimedia tools and projects.
• This goal will be attained through a mix of offline and online activities targeted at our prospective audiences. We are literally going to bring Wikimedia activities to the doorsteps of these groups of people through engagement and provision of our resources that meet their specific needs or interests.
• It's relevant to our work because readership is a segment of the audience Wikimedia serves and without them our projects will have no relevance. Readers are also prospective editors to our projects and the right kind of awareness strategy can lead them to a new found interest around our projects.
• We believe that by the end of the year we may be able to exceed our goal of 30 on this program.

Projects:

• Kiwix Outreach Program
• Wiki Session in Liberia

Kiwix Outreach Program

As rural and developing communities continue to exist, we want to embark on a series of outreach programs targeted at schools in deprived areas who lack access to the internet. This project seeks to pave the way to ensure a sustaining club since accessibility to offline readable materials are scarce. Additionally, most students and teachers in Ghana are not aware of available open resource materials including KWIX. This project has been piloted in about 5 schools in the Ashanti Region of Ghana and the need assessment conducted prior to our training indicated that over 95% of the students and over 70% of teachers had not heard nor used Wikipedia. This we believe will enhance teaching and learning outcomes in these schools. For these reasons and more, we intend to run the project in 15 secondary schools across Ghana. The program will also adopt a strategy in penetrating the school system by introducing Wikimedia Education to teachers and administrators.

Objectives

• Extending access of Kiwix to students across the country.
• Integrate Kiwix into school’s curriculum so as to increase usage time and adequate understanding of the resource
• Complement the It is expected that access will lead to improved academic performance and better test scores.
• Encourage editing and readership
• It will also afford them the opportunity to use Kiwix in their lesson preparations and for research.
• Enhance learning outcomes of both teachers and students

Wiki Session in Liberia

Our quest to train and recruit volunteers for the movement in the past have been very fruitful. We have trained and supported more than 6 affiliates within the movement of which 3 have become user groups. We have identified an opportunity in Liberia where we have already trained about 3 individuals ready to lead Wikimedia Initiatives in Liberia. We deem this initiative crucial to starting a community there and one that complements our mandate to work within the West African sub-region. With the already remote training provided to the three individuals, we wish to provide in-person support toward their first Wikimedia training and to provide inputs on how to start and manage a community. We will also provide continuous support after the event to establish a community and support its existence in order to help it thrive.

Objectives

• Extending the course of Wikimedia to those who have been left out
• Creating awareness of Wikimedia and its activities to newer communities or groups
• Forging new partnerships and creating contents that augment the quality of existing articles or provide new content from Liberia

Collective Metrics:

• Involve at least 30 participants.
• Recruit 30 new volunteers.
• Create 70 content pages.
• Re-use at least 10 images across Wikimedia projects.
• Maintain at least 20 active people.
• Improve the presence of Wikipedia in Ghana and extend to the West African subregion.

Organizational Development

Capacity Building and Community Development

The section consists of five different events/activities targeted at revising our work in the past year and building community and staff health. This encompasses all our events and activities aimed at building a solid community to ensure events, projects and interventions are carried out successfully. This will also include the training and development of volunteers with the requisite technical and project management skills to surge interest and increase retention. Our efforts and the opportunities created with the 2019 SAPG increased our presence in one additional region.

SMART GOALS

• The goal of this priority area is to ensure that the needs and interests of the community are met. The goal is to enforce commitment, contributions and to ensure sustainability of our community.
• In the next 3 to 5 years we want our strategies around this priority area to churn new community leaders or movement organizers.
• This priority will be achieved through carefully crafted community engagement and communication strategies. It will also be achieved through consistent guidance on topical contributions and initiatives around Wikimedia projects.
• It's relevant to our main goal of producing content and showcasing the benefits of our platforms.
• By the end of the fiscal year We expect our membership to grow by 10% and about 10% increase in our active membership.

Projects:

• Monthly Community meetups in Accra, Kumasi & Ho
• Quarterly Community meet-ups in Tarkwa, Cape Coast & Koforidua
• Wiki language community
• Train the trainers
• Advance Wiki Training
• Online Training Resources
• Team Retreat & Strategic Planning
• Wikimania participation (New Staff)
• Chairpersons Meeting

Monthly Community Meetups

Our monthly meet-ups are intended to enable us to host regular meetups at our hubs in Accra, Kumasi, Ho, Winneba and Tamale since these are now well established hubs and will be autonomous in running their activities. What we have realized is that recruited volunteers often contribute more when they attend activities or events, in this regard we have decided to organise monthly meet ups to contribute towards the thematic causes and to use the opportunity to constantly serve as a reminder to our members of their core commitment to maintain activeness of our membership. These regular meetups will ensure that at least once in a month new members and old members alike will get together to contribute to Wikimedia projects. These monthly and quarterly meet-ups will be thematic such that at every month volunteers get the chance to meet, learn new things and also contribute to diverse topics (Language Sessions, Wikidata Sessions, Commons Sessions, etc.). These meet ups will help forge a healthy and sustainable community. It will also ensure that the capacity of old and new volunteers are enhanced within the movement.

Objectives

• Maintain the interest of members as well as new recruits.
• Train new and old volunteers on basic editing tools.
• Give members and new members the opportunity to contribute and network on a regular basis.
• Create an active community for local language Wikipedias.
• Create awareness about local language Wikipedias in Ghana.
• Promote the readership and usage of Ghanaian languages online.

Quarterly Community Meetups

If you follow the trend of our activities from our previous SAPG, we used the quarterly meetups to organically grow newer hubs that we created. As a follow up to some partnerships we have secured, we intend having hubs work at a slow pace compared to the already developed ones, hence the quarterly paced out activities (to reduce the risk of being overwhelmed or burned out). This year we are moving into 4 new regions in Ghana; Eastern Region, Central Region, Western Region and Upper West Region. The quarterly meet-ups help us to activate these communities, especially because they are out of our domicile region (outside Accra) and we deem them essential to increasing reach and ensuring penetration to the length and breadth of Ghana. This will provide a unique outreach opportunity in other parts of the country where we don’t primarily operate. We already have volunteers on the ground whom we trained and will be in charge of these communities under our close supervision as an extension of OFWA. The first meet up will be a training session and the subsequent two (2) will be edit-a-thons to provide an opportunity for the community to get a chance to contribute to Wikimedia projects. We will do this in the 4 new regions we have gained partnerships in and are looking forward to expanding.

Objectives Begin and maintain outreach of the movement in other parts of the country thereby giving volunteers in these areas the chance to contribute. Increase content about the new regions on Wikipedia. Create awareness about Wikipedia and its sister projects online. Recruit new volunteers from other parts of Ghana and give them the opportunity and platform to contribute to Wikipedia and its sister projects.

Collective Metrics

• Involve 80 volunteers in the course of the project
• Recruit at least 60 new volunteers.
• Improve and create over 100 articles on 9 different topics/themes in Ghana.
• Re-use at least 30 images across Wikimedia projects.
• Translate at least 50 new contents across Wikimedia projects

Wiki Language Community

Wiki language community activities offer capacity building opportunities for translators within the community to improve their skills in contributing to Wikipedia in the respective local languages. These activities will provide a unique opportunity for members of our community to learn and augment their knowledge in translation. As part of our activities there will be two workshops organised with professionals who will provide more academic and professional insights on the techniques of translation. The University of Winneba which is the premier language institution in Ghana will host a workshop that will be led by Dr. Anima (the only Ghanaian to have completed a Phd in a local language) to address techniques of translation. At the Language Bureau, our contributors will be taking through a hands-on experience and climaxed with tasks on translating pre-selected Wikipedia articles. These avid language contributors can empower and recruit new members interested in this area of work on Wikipedia.

Train the Trainers

The train-the-trainers session offers all our hub leaders across the country an opportunity to improve their skills on topics around leadership, community management, conflict resolution and advanced editing skills. This allows the OFWA team to constantly check in and measure the capacity of these leaders to ensure effective management of all our hubs and communities at that level. This training will also offer an opportunity for new leaders who have just started their hubs or clubs to learn new skills, understand the organisations structures and byelaws as well as discuss new ways of improving processes at the regional levels. Lastly it will provide these leaders an opportunity to connect with their colleagues leaders, learn about their initiatives and share ideas from their respective hubs.

Advance Wiki Training

The Advance Wiki Training is an opportunity to convene the most active and passionate members of our community in a training focused on improving their skills on other Wiki projects of interest. Our 2020 community engagement survey revealed that our community needs skills in other Wikimedia projects as well as to improve their skill level and ability to do more on the Wikis. The training will consist of 15 active members within our community across the regions. We will host two of such opportunities in the next 15 months, participants will receive certificates upon completion. We are hoping these certificates will increase the interest of our members to strive for a new mastery level and recognition. This journey could ascertain the skill levels and encourage healthy competition among our members.

Online Training Resources

Covid has taught us that virtual is gold. Over the past few months we have realised how crucial virtual training opportunities are to our movement. We want to capitalize on this opportunity to host pre-recorded wikimedia training at all times to provide all and sundry who wish to learn about wikipedia an opportunity to do so. With virtual training, we can scale beyond our current capacity, this is why we have partnered with an organization called Wired Tutor to effect online training on their platform.

Team Capacity Building and Strategic Planning

OFWA is very keen on maintaining a well rounded and staff strength that meets the needs of its community. This has been showcased in our quest to grow a team that reflects our priority or focus areas. We are also very keen on strengthening our teams cohesion and improving their abilities to suit our growing needs as an organisation. These goals we continue to achieve through capacity building opportunities and other opportunities that compliment this focus. Our community is not left out on this action and hence our carefully planned community engagement strategies and the annual general meeting to capture and ably address their needs.

Annual General Meeting (AGM)

This is our yearly meeting with the community and major stakeholders to highlight our achievements in the past year and discuss plans for the coming year. It is also an avenue to collect feedback from our stakeholders and community. Future voting for community representatives to the board will be held at this forum.

Team Retreat & Strategic Planning

The event focuses on team appraisal, meeting with the board to address issues within the organisation and to build the capacity of the team in areas where they fall short. It is also the only opportunity in the year to increase team spirit through team bonding and addressing feedback collected during the AGM with the hopes of coming up with strategies that take into consideration stakeholders and volunteer plights.

Wikimania participation (New Staff

Providing an immersive opportunity for our staff within the larger Wikimedia movement. This will also be an opportunity to engage, share lessons from our projects and as well learn from other projects across the movement.

Chairpersons Meeting

As part of our investments to build the capacity of the personnel that manage and provide support to our organisation. We are excited to provide capacity building opportunity for our board to enhance their work. As a recent member of the Wikimedia Chairpersons Group, we believe the convening of such leaders in the community is instrumental to learning and also providing the forum for strategic discussions within the movement.

Objectives:

• Ensure every community member has a sense of belonging and identity towards OFWA.
• Gathering feedback from all stakeholders and considering these in planning towards the incoming year.
• Invite target or prospective partners to learn about what we do.
• Growing team spirit and bonding to improve productivity.
• Drawing strategic priorities and plans for the coming year.

Global Metrics Reporting

Please find our grant metrics here.

Mid-term Report

Please find our mid-term report here

Final Report

Please find our final report here