Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Igbo Wikimedians User Group's 2023 Simple Annual Grant

Feedback from the Middle East and Africa Regional Funding Committee on your proposal

Hello User: Tochiprecious and User: Blossom Ozurumba,

Thank you for sharing your application with us. We found it clear, easy to understand, well organized, and feasible to implement. We acknowledge the proposal focuses on organizing contests, edit-a-thons, and campaigns, which are good ways to not only retain members but also recruit new volunteers. It's good to see that a different approach is targeted to involve tertiary institutions that is through heads of department and that your activities are student or community-centered. It would be useful as you go along with the implementation of the project for you to document best practices that can be shared with others in the region on the community-centered approach in organizing and how to engage tertiary institutions.

To support us in the next phase of the review, please share your comments, thoughts, and response to the following; 

• We are curious to know how sure you are that the appointment of club leaders will help manage the various fan clubs.
• We suggest that you do not fund all the clubs at a go and instead take a phased learning approach and fund one or two clubs first and if the strategy works they can extend funds to other clubs.
• There is no explicit mention of training teachers, considering the goal of the proposal. A cue can be taken from Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom Initiatives to help the organizers in achieving their goals. Is this something you have taken into consideration?
• We are keen on understanding the rationale behind the indicated need for a fourth staff. How does this additional role support your project and how different is it, when we compare it to your current projects?
• Would you share more on what motivates the increase of a Micro Grant from $12000?
• Regarding the clubs and hubs, how do you plan to administer the budget allocation of $40,000 - is there a process to be followed? What other support beyond funding is provided to hubs? How do you plan to ensure that the funds will be well-managed and evenly distributed?
• As you continue to grow we are keen to understand your plan for leadership development and nurturing robust structures for healthy governance including financial management systems in your organization. We would like to know what you have put in place so far and where you envision the organization heading and the plan to get there.
• Lastly, we encourage you to review the metrics section to also align with the learning questions you have indicated. What metrics can you use to help you capture what you need to support your learning?

We highly recommend you get in touch with the regional program officer to support you in understanding the questions raised or if you find it useful to meet with the committee as well, please let them know and they can organize a conversation meeting.

Thank you and we look forward to receiving your responses to support us in the next steps. On behalf of the MEA Regional Committee and Staff--VThamaini (WMF) (talk) 17:16, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Thank you so much @VThamaini (WMF) for taking your time to review our proposal and asking questions.

Here are the responses:

• We have tested out the appointment of Club leaders to help manage the Fan Clubs for example using the University of Nigeria Fan Club and Alvan Ikoku College of Education. These clubs are seen as catchment areas with these leaders helping to manage them and keeping the community engaged while sustaining them. This further gives us assurance that these decentralizations will help in further growing and sustaining our community
• About funding the clubs, we do not fund them all at ones. We simply have allocations for bi monthly or three to four times meetings/edit a thons in a year. Aside the general community engagements, this further helps to keep them engaged and not being washed away.

• Yes, we have taken the training of teachers into consideration. In fact, 50% of the Fan Club leaders are University lecturers whom we’ve mentored to carry on these activities.
• Because we want to work with more partners next year, we realized the need for someone who is savvy in partnership development and partnership related activities hence our proposal for a Partnership consultant to assist us.
• Our Micro grants help fund individual and less expensive project ideas from our community members which align with our goals and objectives while also reducing the number of Igbo Community members who go requesting for rapid grants when they’re less savvy on project management. Depending on the budget of each individual, we fund up to 10 mini projects per quarter with at least $500. The increase is to be able to fund more mini projects that help us grow as a community. It means that if $500 funds a mini project, $12,000 can fund 20 to 24 mini projects.
• For funding of our hubs, we usually do this based on hub projects proposals. Most times, we have a budget threshold to enable us have more funds for more hub projects. We also go out of our way to source funds/funding collaborations for our hub projects. For example, the Wiki Mentor Africa project was developed from the Wikidata and we got a funding collaboration from Wikimedia Deutschland to enable us develop the technical capacity of the African community to help in maintaining and building new community tools through trainings and mentorships from experienced developers.
• Because we,ve seen how rapidly we’re growing, early this October, we succeeded in registering the Igbo Wikimedians User Group as a Non-Profit under the Nigerian Cooperate Affairs Commission. This will help us develop proper structures for our User group.
• Thank you, our metrics will be reviewed.

Thank you for the recommendations. We've also booked a meeting time with the regional committee to further discuss and understand our proposal better.

Thank you again. Tochiprecious (talk) 12:56, 31 October 2022 (UTC)

Wikimedia Community Fund approved in the amount of 81000 USD

Hello User:Tochiprecious and User: Blossom Ozurumba,

Congratulations! Your grant is approved in the amount of 81,000 USD, with a grant term starting January 2023-December 2023.

Thank you for submitting your application seeking General Support Funds - Wikimedia Community Fund. The Middle East and Africa Regional Committee and Staff have reviewed your application and recommended funding in the amount $81,000 for the period of January 2023 - December 2023 .

As we shared before, we found your proposal to very clear, well organized and that your work is very community centered. We continue to see the value of your work and impact to the community and movement as a whole. We are excited to see you grow the support towards the hubs and fan clubs and encourage you to provide more information on the future on the criteria for resource allocation - a breakdown of this budget will be helpful as well, so that we know what is entailed in the bulk pack resource. We also encourage in the future to have a further breakdown of the personnel costs to support us in better understanding the dedicated time and resources for each role.

Would also like to encourage you to work towards strengthening the mini-grants program especially towards more accountability and transparency, including having available dashboards where the community can see the projects being supported and their reports as well. We understand that this may require more personnel effort and recommend reviewing the roles for this need.

Otherwise, we are excited about your programs and look forward to learning more about the progress you make and the impact you achieve.

We wish you the very best in your work.

Best regards from the MEA Regional Committee and Staff --Aristidek5maya (talk) 12:11, 1 December 2022 (UTC)