WikiVibrance is running a campaign to commemorate Africa Youth Day 2022 in the Wikimedia movement.
This is the second iteration of the project implemented under the Africa Knowledge Initiative (AKI) which is a joint partnership between the Wikimedia Foundation, African Union and Africa No Filter with the aim of bridging the Africa Knowledge gap on the internet through Wikimedia projects.
The AKI is bridging this gap through set activities around African Union holidays such as Africa Youth Day, recognized annually every 1st November among others.
The Africa Youth Month 2022 campaign was launched on 29th October by WikiVibrance and Africa Knowledge Initiative with an online webinar seen here.
WikiVibrance is an Initiative focused on youth engagement in the Wikimedia movement. Given their mission, aligned with the African Union holiday of Africa Youth Day, they were selected to implement a campaign around this holiday.
Hence they are driving Africa Youth Month 2022, a month-long campaign in commemoration of the holiday, working with Wikimedia communities in about 10 countries in Africa and the diaspora.
These communities include Open Foundation West Africa (OFWA) in Ghana; Nigerian Wikimedians for Sustainable Development in Nigeria; AfroCrowd in the US, Wikimedia Rwanda, Wikimedia Arusha in Tanzania, Wikimedia Botswana, Wikimedia DRC, Wikimedia Benin Republic, Wikimedia South Sudan and Wikimedia Haiti.
These communities are organizing photo walks, translation and editing activities to contribute content focused on the theme “Breaking the Barriers to Meaningful Youth Participation and Inclusion in Advocacy” on Wikipedia, Wikiquote, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons.
This content contributes to diverse languages including the AU languages of English, French, and Swahili as well as other local African languages such as Hausa, Dagbani, Twi, Kinyarwanda, Igbo, Haitian creole, Yoruba, Setswana, Akan, as well as Danish.
In Rwanda, about 45 Rwanda youth were engaged in a photo walk to Rwanda Mountain Tea and an Edit-a-thon from 8th-10th November 2022. Rwanda Mountain Tea is reportedly the largest tea company in Africa and yet not sufficiently represented in the internet verse.
Through this campaign, images about the company were captured and uploaded on Wikimedia commons. An article about the tea campaign was also created on Wikipedia. Other articles about Rwanda on Wikipedia and its sister projects were improved as well as created.
The campaign is led by the WikiVibrance Core Team (Euphemia Uwandu, James Popoola, Eben Mlay, Douglas Ssebaggala, Francesc Fort & Mrb Rafi), the Wikipedian-In-Residence (WIR) for Africa Knowledge Initiative, Ceslause Ogbonnaya and volunteers (Rene Bile, & Mayokun Akinyemi).
According to the WikiVibrance founder & coordinator, Euphemia Uwandu, one way the African Union brought in meaningful action on the campaign theme is to release their knowledge archive to serve as a credible source for young people to tell their stories in the digital space. That is a wonderful way to break the barrier to meaningful youth participation and inclusion in free knowledge advocacy.
In one month of starting the campaign, we have engaged 524 young people across 10 countries, improved 9099 Wikipedia articles, created 4028 Wikipedia articles in multiple languages, created 1000 Wiki Data items and uploaded 1065 images to Wikimedia commons. These numbers are soaring as the excited youth in participating communities are continuing the campaign through December 2022.
According to Ceslause Ogbonnaya, Wikimedian-In-Residence for Africa Knowledge Initiative:
“The only people who have what it takes to match statements with hands-on actions are the youth, due to the energy they possess to do anything. Africa Youth Day 2022 by AKI has actively engaged African youths to be frontliners in rewriting the Africa narrative”.
According to Valentin Nasibu, the lead campaign organizer for Wikimedia DRC:
”As an African, contributing to Africa and especially about youth has always been a passion but often within my community (WMDRC-UG), which is predominantly made up of youth, we lacked inspiration and especially sources. Boom the Africa Youth Month 2022 campaign has managed to solve all these problems. So, let’s enjoy.”
According to Constant Azogbonon, the lead campaign organizer for Wikimedia Benin Republic:
”Young people play an important role in the succession of a group, network, or movement. With this acknowledgement, we have mobilized our young people to participate in the campaign. The experience to see the desire of our young people to bring change in African knowledge in the digital space through the campaign is irreplaceable”.
According to Ruby D-Brown, the lead campaign organizer for Open Foundation West Africa in Ghana:
“Given our young population, I believe the Africa Union’s participation in the Africa Knowledge Initiative will help us have a greater impact as a continent in bridging the Africa Knowledge gap online. This campaign has created a sense of urgency and the need for Africans, especially the youth to come together to be empowered to achieve a common goal”.
According to Romeo Ronald Lomora, the lead campaign organizer in South Sudan:
“Working with refugee youths in creating and shaping the African stories in the Africa Youth Month 2022 campaign is very refreshing, explorative and exciting. The youths were excited to be a part of an impact-oriented global community of Wikimedians which gives them the hope that they can also be a part of a solution even though they are refugees. This experience is irreplaceable.”
According to Candy Tricia Khohliwe, the lead campaign organizer in Botswana:
“The campaign is quite exciting and definitely there has been a lot we have learnt from well-experienced Wikimedians. We appreciate the opportunity to be a part of the AKI campaign here in Botswana as it has given us the opportunity to evangelize more and recruit new editors to contribute to various Wikimedia projects.”
According to Mayokun Akinyemi, the lead campaign organizer for Nigerian Wikimedians for Sustainable Development
“The campaign has given me the opportunity to work with other community leaders outside my jurisdiction.”