Wiki In Africa Impact Strategy 2030

In 2025, as the first multi-year grant came to a close, the Wiki In Africa team embarked on a comprehensive impact review and future strategy process.

Our Impact Strategy 2025 Process was comprehensive. It involved 4 months of internal thought-provoking workshops, asynchronous reviews, and community research. We asked the Wikimedia community what they wanted and conducted multiple in-person interviews with key Wikimedians. The team was also guided through an Impact Strategy workshop by external consultants Skating Panda. The Impact Strategy 2030 has provided a framework that guides the future development and expansion of our work and programs. 

Essential elements of the Impact Strategy involved: 

• validating and recalibrating our initial aims and intentions, 

• reinforcing our organisational values,

• reaffirming our position and role within the Wikimedia community, 

• isolating the key expectations of our community, 

• assessing internal and external threats, 

• considering our stakeholders’ needs and expectations,  

• consolidating our approach towards four strategic pillars, and

• ultimately our new Impact Statement. 

The entire Strategy Process can be found here. Every aspect has influenced the construction of this proposal and multi-year plan; however, for reasons of brevity, we will detail the key elements below. 

The four strategic pillars being applied from 2026 onwards are:

• Activation: Creating entry points and return touchpoints that build interest, momentum, and integration into the Wikimedia movement.

• Leadership & Capacity Building: Making explicit our investment in people, thus creating longer-term sustainability. 

• Enablement: The explicit and implicit support that our staff and programs provide, ensuring that communities thrive.

• Partnering: Building relationships that strengthen and sustain the wider open-knowledge movement.

>> More detail here.

Guided by these documents until 2030, and specifically for this plan between 2026 and 2028, Wiki In Africa will continue to support and expand its current range of projects in alignment with and through the lens of these recalibrated strategic pillars and the guidelines of the Impact Strategy. 

The organisation’s overall strategy is to develop our projects to their full sustainable potential, facilitating the development of content by supporting the growth and development of Wikimedia and aligned communities. It is also to activate new programs to close identified gaps in content and community development.

The Impact Statement

After an intensive period of internal work by staff reviewing, workshoping, and creating or updating several documents intended to inform the Impact Strategy, Wiki In Africa then worked with Skating Panda across mid-2025 with the following project objectives: to consolidate perceptions of WIA both internally and externally; to provide strategic recommendations that help define a clear path forward for WIA; and to equip WIA with a high-level theory of change and Impact Framework.

Programmatic Strategic Focuses

The overarching aims and intentions of our projects are to:

• Focus on bringing communities together and helping them grow.

• Promote open knowledge as something built and led by communities.

• Facilitate change in how knowledge is created and shared.

• Ensure that African ways of knowing are valued and respected equally.

Most of our programs are of long standing, especially the flagship programs. Their specific focuses have evolved since the first in 2014, informed by numerous global and Wikimedia movement research and strategic priorities, most notable of which are the Wikimedia 2030 Movement Strategy Recommendations, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, and the Wikimedia Foundation’s own Knowledge Gaps Index. 

With these priority topics in mind, the programs are loosely grouped into key strategic focuses: 

• Representation and Knowledge Gaps

• Youth Activation and Open Education

• Tools and Technology (including Offline), and 

• Community Cohesion and Care

Representation and Knowledge Gaps

The Representation Gap projects aim to close the gaps in representation, visibility, knowledge and expression. Whilst almost all of our programs do this work to a large degree, this  “bucket” specifically contains the following programs:

• Wiki Loves Africa presents an opportunity for people in Africa to make contributions that bring to light, through visual representations, the everyday aspects of Africa. 

• Wiki Loves Women encourages the agency of and trains women in closing knowledge that relates to women, and makes visible the many notable women who have been silenced or hidden.

• WikiAfrica Environment, begun as a pilot program in 2023, is focused on harnessing and upskilling Wikimedians to add and make visible vital research and data to reflect the looming Climate Crisis and its impact on each country’s environment.

Youth Activation and Open Education

Wiki In Africa’s education focus is a long-game strategy. Many of the volunteers coming into the movement must first deconstruct and re-assess how copyright works and how knowledge platforms collate information before they can effectively contribute to the Wikimedia projects. The education programmes (large and small) introduce participating teachers and children to alternative ways of creating and sharing knowledge through open movement practices. The programmes also teach, through practical application, media use, and essential digital, research, and writing skills.

In 2025, Wiki In Africa intends to focus on the following Youth Activation and Open Education programs:

• WikiChallenge Écoles d’Afrique & WikiChallenge African Schools (soon to be in Arabic countries too)

• WikiAfrica OERs (Open Education Resources)

• Note: WikiFundi Offline is a key tool in our Education toolbox

For many years, we have been planning to reactivate a revised version of WikiAfrica Schools, and have also received many requests for school programs in both English and French beyond the WikiChallenge program in partnership with the Orange Fondation. We will be exploring alternative options in 2026, including a WikiAfrica Schools Program Training.

Tools and Technology (including Offline)

The technology tools developed by Wiki In Africa are vastly different, but they solve two barrier-raising challenges. 

The first challenge, addressed by WikiFundi for Offline, is to continue Wikimedia training and contributions when electricity and access to data are either cut off, too expensive to provide, or not reliably available. We developed the WikiFundi Offline as a solution to sustain training and content contributions for both schools and Wikimedia community groups. 

The second challenge, addressed by the ISA Tool, is to ensure that images contributed by Wiki Loves Africa and other Wikimedia initiatives to Wikimedia Commons can be easily found. Linking structured data in the form of WikiData items to describe elements of each image is the focus of the ISA Tool. The tool uses gaming tactics and an engaging interface to motivate ‘players’ to depict image elements. 

Both tools have received accolades from the very different communities that they support. In 2021, WikiFundi was awarded the Open Education Award of Excellence for Open Infrastructure.  Find the Open Infrastructure 2021 award page here. The ISA Tool was awarded the Eggbeater Prize at the Coolest Tool Awards 2024, held during Wikimania Katowice.

Community Cohesion

There are many stakeholders involved in the development of Wikimedia activity across Africa and beyond. The more successful our collective strategies are, the greater the risk that a broad and diverse African community will become a series of silos that are inwardly focused. Wiki In Africa’s strengths are in connecting Wikimedians, and introducing Wikimedians (new and established) to Wikimedia opportunities beyond their local and national communities. 

WikiAfrica Hour is a live, monthly ‘show’ that initiates frank, sometimes controversial conversations about what is happening within the Wikimedia movement and their implications for the African region—the show broadcasts on the last Wednesday of each month. 

WikiAfrica Cares is a short-term programme (intended for 2026) to introduce Wikimedians to the Universal Code of Conduct and the Friendly Space Policy. The programme aims to increase community health through understanding these two key policies better and hosting workshops on the implications of implementing them in their community. Additional skills around personal safety and digital security will also be shared. 

Strategic Pillars

How The Impact Strategy 2030 Applies To Our Programs

From 2026 onwards, the fundamental principles, activities and structures for each program remain; however, their activities are guided by the new strategic pillars. Below, we share the key goals driving our programs bracketed within the four strategic pillars:

• Activation Points

  • Close representation gaps

  • Make Women visible and encourage Gender Equity

  • Activate youth and the next generation of Wikimedians

  • Foreground knowledge about the Climate crisis

  • Make visible key Wikimedia touchpoints beyond Wiki In Africa

• Enablement (Support & Service)

  • Facilitate access via offline and other tools

  • Promote Community cohesion and care

• Leadership and Capacity Building

  • Provide program-embedded training

  • Provide ongoing leadership support in different ways

  • Provide capacity building across the movement to support Wikimedians at different stages of their journeys.

• Partnerships

  • Activating and supporting Wikimedia communities, Usergroups and Chapters

  • Activating partnerships with external content custodians across culture, photography, media, heritage, climate and other key subject areas.

Informing the Impact Strategy