Open Foundation West Africa/Events & Projects

Kiwix logo

Africa Wiki Challenge

Africa Wiki Challenge is an online campaign that calls on Africans all over the world, to contribute to African-related content online.

Many times, most African-related article(s) do not have videos or photos to help visualise the topic and add to the credibility. Inadvertently, this reduces the interest in reading existing African-related articles on Wikipedia.

It goes without saying that Ghana and for that matter Africa is lacking, especially in terms of content on Wikipedia. Most annual Wikimedia conferences organised both in Africa and outside Africa, from WikiIndaba to Wikimania have sought to find practical ways to deal with this African content gap. This Campaign is a giant step in the attempt to bridge the existing Africa-related content gap on the world's largest online encyclopedia, Wikipedia.

Kiwix4schools Project

The Kiwix4Schools Project was borne out of a desire to alleviate the numerous challenges that students in Ghana face when accessing internet-based curricula resources. The project aims at providing students the opportunity to access available educational information. Most Schools in Ghana, students and teachers always face the challenge of unreliable Internet access along with the high cost of connecting and maintaining internet infrastructure. This situation has forced many students and teachers to rely solely on textbooks for learning and teaching respectively, without the opportunity to access extra reading materials or alternative forms of educational content from the internet. KIWIX as a platform serves as a complementary service to education by helping to provide offline forms of the alternative resources and materials that the internet offers. This helps to escape the burden of the exorbitant cost of internet access for schools in Ghana today.

As stated above, the Kiwix4Schools Project aims at proffering a sustainable solution to the current challenges around internet access in Junior and Senior High Schools in Ghana through the installation of KIWIX together with a curriculum-friendly package.

The Government of Ghana through the Ghana Education Service has implemented various projects and initiatives that seek to promote Information Communication Technology (ICT) education in Basic and Secondary schools in Ghana.

These include:

Building new Computer laboratories
One Student One laptop initiative
Furnishing Schools’ Libraries with computers among others.

The goal of the project has been to provide students the opportunity to access available educational information. This goal has however, not been achieved because of the numerous challenges that come with Internet access in schools in Ghana coupled with the high cost of connecting and maintaining internet infrastructure in schools by school authorities.

This has forced many students and teachers to rely solely on textbooks for learning and teaching respectively, without the opportunity to access extra reading materials or alternative forms of educational content that the internet offers.

The Kiwix4Schools Project was borne out of our desire to alleviate the challenges above, as best as we could.

Founders' Day Ghana Writing Contest

Founders day is a day set aside to celebrate the anniversary of the establishment of a society or organization. It is celebrated all over the world within various institutions and countries. Since 2019, the 4th of August was declared as Founder's Day in Ghana.

Founder's Day is a day meant to commemorate the pioneers and forefathers who led the way towards the independence of Ghana. The Founders Day Ghana Writing Contest is an initiative of Open Foundation West Africa in collaboration with the Goethe Institute and the Wikimedia Foundation to commemorate the emancipation fight of the founders of this noble land earmarked for 4th August in Ghana.

The themes over the years have been "Decolonizing the internet through Founders Day Writing Contest." and "Projecting Ghanaian leaders"

Africa Wikimedia Technical Community

AWMT Community formerly known as Africa Wikimedia Developers Project (AWMD) initially started as a project that sought to start a developer community on the African continent and to encourage more developers to volunteer for the Wikimedia Foundation. Over the years, the project has broadened its scope and made opportunities for other technical contributions to be a part of the project hence the change of name from Africa Wikimedia Developers Project (AWMD) to Africa Wikimedia Technical Community (AWMT) Our mission is to create an enabling ecosystem for developers who are willing to learn and build new skills in the open space through volunteering as technical contributions for the Wikimedia Foundation.

Book Exchange Both

Wiki Loves festivals

How often do you witness and capture the display of rich culture, beautiful faces, magnificent ancient traditions, and charming ornaments exhibited during festivals? Are these captivating moments you witness during festivals a true reflection of how they are represented on the web? Festivals are an essential part of the human race and it depicts the way of life of a group of people. Festivals are used to communicate and preserve ancient occurrences, these are done through the songs (folksongs), stories (folktales), and actions exhibited during the celebration. Festivals are celebrated for many reasons or are celebrated to tell different stories about a particular tribe or culture, usually having backgrounds relating to an occurrence in the history of that culture. They are meant to celebrate or commemorate special moments and emotions in the lives of people. From Glastonbury Festival in England, the Homowo festival in Ghana, the Sango Fire festival in Nigeria, and to the various carnivals in the Caribbean.

Albeit the importance of festivals, they are scarcely covered on Wikimedia Commons and often limited to stubs on Wikipedia. Many of these articles, even if they exist, lack photos or videos to further visualize, tell the story, or enrich the experience of the reader or seekers of such knowledge.

In our bid to promote culture and heritage, we at Open Foundation West Africa are running The Wiki Loves Festivals campaign again this year, after a pilot of the project with several members of the Ghanaian community in 2019. We wish to use this campaign as a medium to promote the importance of Festivals and to seek to improve the visualization of such content on Wikipedia.

Conference

WikiIndaba Conference is the regional conference for Africans both within and in the diaspora. The first edition was held in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 2014 by Wikimedia ZA which happens to be the only Wikimedia Chapter in Africa. This brought together Wikimedians and people from the Open Community within Africa and in the Diaspora. In fulfillment of this tradition, Ghana hosted the second edition of this Conference in Accra. This was organized by the Wikimedia Community in Ghana with support from other Wikimedia Groups across Africa. The mission of Wiki Indaba was to strengthen the existence of Wikipedia and its sister projects on the African Continent through the collaboration of local communities. A serious discussion was taken into consideration to analyse the situation, exchange ideas, set a strategy, and find ways of support and cooperate in advancing this cause. This was also used to foster ties between Africans on the African Continent and in the Diaspora who invariably contribute to promoting African content.

The Ghana Polls 2020

The Ghana Polls is a campaign organized by Open Foundation West Africa targeted at educating the Ghanaian people about the need to exercise their constitutional right. More importantly, it is aimed at encouraging peaceful elections for the 2020 electioneering process. Ultimately, it is a campaign to increase Ghana’s visibility on Wikipedia and the web at large by curating and creating content about Ghana’s election process and the key actors involved. Anyone can contribute to this project by sharing content using the hash tag #TheGhanaPolls2020. Understanding the need for peace before, during and after elections, we have rolled out a campaign to admonish the Ghanaian populace to keep the peace.