Announcing the newest round of Knowledge Equity Fund grantees

Three years ago, the Wikimedia Foundation introduced the Knowledge Equity Fund as an experiment to contribute to closing knowledge gaps and addressing knowledge equity, one of the two pillars of the 2030 movement strategy. The goal was to support groups who are creating and sharing knowledge with populations left out of mainstream knowledge structures because of racial barriers of power and privilege. By supporting a larger knowledge ecosystem, the Knowledge Equity Fund seeks to help Wikimedia communities to address pressing knowledge gaps in their language or region.

Since the Equity Fund first began, we’ve learned a lot about how we can be effective partners in the movement to address knowledge equity. Through multiple community conversations that we hosted in 2023, we heard feedback from volunteers about the goals and impact of the Knowledge Equity Fund which led us to make some key changes for our upcoming rounds of funding. 

These changes include

• More consistent and clear communication about the Knowledge Equity Fund, its grants and impact
• Opportunities for movement groups to also receive grants for work they are doing to address knowledge equity
• Clearer measures of impact for Knowledge Equity Fund grants

Achievements of our Round 2 grantees

In September 2023, we announced our second round of grantees. As part of the grant, our grantees have shared impact reports with us of their ongoing work before the conclusion of their one-year grant. We’ve published these grants on Meta, and a final one-year report will be forthcoming in the next couple of months. A few highlights from these reports include:

• Project Multatuli: with the grant, they have produced 16 stories, including two photojournalism essays, that touch on a wide range of issues in Indonesia, ranging from the role of indigenous women in society, public health, and culture to underprivileged youth, disability, and human rights. These stories can now serve as sources for Wikipedia articles on these topics. There is a further opportunity to connect Project Multatuli with local Wikimedians for initiatives that can make use of their investments in photojournalism 

• Create Caribbean: They received 60 nominations to their public call for participants for their oral history project. The team has conducted virtual and onsite interviews with people in Antigua, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, Dominica and St. Lucia to collect nontraditional sources of knowledge. 

• The Alliance of Indigenous Peoples of the Archipelago (AMAN): They organized three training sessions for indigenous and citizen journalists in North Sumatra, Riau, and Nusa Bunga. They report that “in 2023, as many as 154 articles have been written by indigenous journalists (JMA) and published on their website. The traffic involved 3,728 users with 20,537 reactions on the website (clicks, shares, comments, etc).” They have also invited Wikimedia Indonesia to these sessions to help learn more about Wikipedia’s content needs, in particular, in relation to knowledge by and about indigenous people.

Announcing Round 3 grantees

With the learnings from the last round of grantees, we are announcing the newest round of grantees who will be recipients of Knowledge Equity Fund grants. We will be giving grants to 13 organizations in 10 countries, supporting work to address knowledge gaps and create and share new knowledge. Hear more from these grantees in their own words:

(1) AfLIA: The African Library and Information Associations and Institutions (AfLIA) is the umbrella body for the library sector in Africa, with membership from 34 African countries. We have worked with the Wikimedia projects through initiatives like the African Librarians Week, which resulted in the Wikipedia in African Libraries course as well as a course on Wikidata which sought to assist these professionals make their information resources more visible for all.  Nevertheless more work remains to be done. Firstly, this grant would enable us to revisit the Authority Control construct in Wikidata and Wikipedia. Currently, the AC template only directs readers of African content to national libraries outside the continent for ‘validation’ through the AC template; with this grant, we will create a model of how African National Libraries can create semantic Authority Control for their resources using Wikibase which can then be linked to African content on Wikidata and Wikipedia, through a collaboration with Wikimedia Deutschland. Secondly, it will allow us to coordinate virtual conversations between the African Library sector and African Wikimedians, as a pathway for promoting Wikimedia projects and activities adoption in African libraries. 

(2) Archive Nepal: Archive Nepal is a volunteer-run nonprofit organization based in Nepal and the USA, focused on preserving and promoting Nepal’s rich cultural heritage by curating, digitizing, and improving access to archival resources. With this grant, we aim to catalog and digitally preserve historic manuscripts from Nepal’s diverse ethnic, minority, and marginalized communities. Through AI-powered tools and collaboration with the Wikisource team, we will engage the global community to transcribe and translate these manuscripts into accessible languages like Nepali and English, addressing inequalities that limit access to these materials. By digitally safeguarding these manuscripts, we ensure their preservation for future generations, while fostering inclusivity, cultural understanding, and community engagement.

(3) Democratic Voice of Burma: Democratic Voice of Burma (DVB) was established in 1992 in Oslo to disseminate unbiased news and information to the people of Burma. Today, we provide 24/7 satellite TV news to people in Burma and publish dozens of stories daily online. Operating from exile, DVB has 100 full-time reporters inside and outside of Burma, with 20 million followers on Facebook, 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube, and a reach of at least  15 million TV viewers inside the country. We will use this grant to run trainings for our journalists and increase capacity building, and further maximize our audience reach through satellite TV, social media, and websites. We hope that the expansion and exposure will result in more openly-available, accurate, and creative content around people and issues of Burma.

(4) Earth Journalism Network: This century, every story is a climate story. Our mission is to strengthen local journalism that serves communities and policymakers on the frontlines of climate and environmental crises, enabling them to shape solutions, hold power to account and demand action. With Wikimedia’s support, we will be implementing two activities. First, we will support Indigenous journalists globally through a training program and story grants as part of our Indigenous Environmental Reporting project. Through the leadership of our Indigenous media trainers Amira Abujbara and Stella Paul, journalists will benefit from 1-1 editorial mentorship, hands-on skills training, connections with key experts, and the funding to complete a longform investigative reporting project. And second, we will be investing in immigrant, Black, Indigenous and people of color-serving local newsrooms in the United States and Canada who serve under-reported communities. We will do this through seed grants to enable them to develop their own innovative reporting projects that call attention to issues, groups and/or locations lacking representation in mainstream media.

(5) Ideas Beyond Borders: Ideas Beyond Borders (IBB) is dedicated to empowering individuals and communities in the Middle East by promoting knowledge, free expression, and intellectual curiosity. Through our work, we challenge censorship and misinformation, fostering a culture of open dialogue and critical thinking. This grant will empower 26 young leaders from 13 ethnic and religious minorities in Iraq and the Kurdistan Region through comprehensive training in journalism, media, and social media advocacy. IBB, Kurdistan Information Network (KurdistanIN), and those leaders will produce 13 documentaries and 13 Wikipedia articles, preserving the unique oral histories and cultural heritage of their communities while raising awareness of minority issues through a large-scale social media campaign.

(6) International Center for Journalists: The International Center for Journalists (ICFJ) enables a global network of journalists to provide the trustworthy news essential to free and strong societies. The grant from Wikimedia Foundation will allow us to expand the multilingual resources we offer journalists on our unparalleled International Journalists’ Network (IJNet), with a focus on topics of critical importance to underrepresented communities. In addition, we will run a “solutions challenge” supporting newsrooms to innovate with AI in ways that deepen trust with the communities they serve.

(7) Just Futures Pahal: Just Futures Pahal (JFP) is a Nepali non-profit organization led by Dalit women and committed to understanding and fostering new narratives on dignity, justice, equity, inclusive democracy, and sustainability through the prism of Caste. We believe that over 120 million Dalit women worldwide must not remain invisible but must be recognized as valuable producers of new knowledge for just futures. This grant will support our inaugural Damal Fellowship, a nine-month intensive program involving six Dalit women to interrogate and foster narratives related to caste, gender, sexuality, and class. Additionally, the grant will help establish a distinct JFP Learning and Resource Center, as well as a digital space for archiving and accessing knowledge materials—textual and non-textual—on these topics and beyond. By doing so, we hope to expand the knowledge of the marginalized in open and accessible ways. 

(8) Kontras: The Commission for the Disappeared and Victims of Violence (KontraS) is a non-profit organization established in Indonesia to promote human rights and democracy, ensuring that the state fulfills its obligations to respect and protect the human rights of its citizens. We will be using this grant to initiate the Human Rights Documentation Center (PUSDOKHAM). PUSDOKHAM has three priority program components: (1) serving as an archive center for human rights-related information in Indonesia, including archiving human rights advocacy activities, human rights defenders, and document human rights violation cases in Indonesia; (2) Providing a platform for citizens to report human rights violations; and (3) serving as an educational center on research methods for human rights monitoring. Based on meetings with local Wikimedia Indonesians, our training agendas will involve collaboration with the Wikimedia community. Through these collaborations we hope to further a partnership between KontraS and the Wikimedia community.

(9) Open Restitution Africa: Open Restitution Africa (ORA) is a pan-African, women-led initiative based in Kenya and South Africa, dedicated to making information on restitution of African material heritage more accessible, transparent and usable. Our work is premised on 3 core areas: collating nuanced grassroots research on restitution processes, providing access to this research via a bespoke open-data platform, and increasing awareness. Over the next 12 months, with this grant from the Knowledge Equity Fund, ORA will publish a series of in-depth restitution case studies, to drive restitution efforts across the continent.

(10) Rising Voices (Global Voices): Global Voices, through its Rising Voices initiative, will use the Knowledge Equity Fund grant to strengthen, build upon, and expand its support to Indigenous language communities. Over the past several years, we have collaborated with various Wikimedia affiliates and contributors in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. We will facilitate spaces to bring together individuals who are part of the Global Voices community and the Wikimedia movement to collaboratively plan and implement future partnerships, leveraging their knowledge of both communities. The initiative will include additional collaborations with Wikimedia groups to provide peer-led digital activism workshops using the “Digital Initiatives for Indigenous Languages” toolkit co-developed with UNESCO as part of the International Decade of Indigenous Languages. This initiative will also expand the peer learning Fellowship Program in Latin America. 

(11) School of Cultural Texts and Records: The School of Cultural Texts and Records at Jadavpur University, India was established in 2003 to enhance the university’s capacities in archiving, digitization, bibliography, textual studies, editing, and book history. Our mission is to promote the use of archives amongst the general public. As the Endangered Archives Programme Hub for South Asia, we also collaborate with the British Library to regularly conduct workshops on various archival practices. Resources from the Knowledge Equity Fund will allow us to extend our reach, allow us to travel to remote areas of India to reach underserved communities and provide workshops on easy and low budget digitisation techniques. We plan to share the digitized items through Wikimedia, creating open access to cultural items of importance that have not been digitized before.

(12) Syria Untold: UntoldStories is an independent media organization running three major projects: SyriaUntold, a bilingual platform covering Syrian voices and stories; MENA Art Gallery, an online space supporting local artists; and UntoldMag, a bilingual magazine addressing interconnected global challenges. With support from Wikimedia, we will focus on amplifying underrepresented voices and telling the stories, past and present, of the diverse peoples who make our communities and preserve them. By producing high quality journalism and knowledge in Arabic and English we challenge mainstream narratives and propose an alternative lens that highlights the intersectional nature of our shared realities across the globe whether in Syria, West Asia, North Africa, and beyond.

(13) Auckland War Memorial: Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum is the largest Museum in Aotearoa New Zealand’s largest, and most diverse city, Tāmaki Makarau Auckland.  For the past five years we have been actively working with various Wikimedia projects enabling it to make its openly licensed collections available to a global audience. This funding allows us to continue our Wikimedia Alliances Funded work, diversifying Auckland local history content on Wikipedia for use in secondary school classrooms. We will support a cohort of four university students in a ten-week Wikipedia editing programme at the Museum, taking part in the Museum’s wider Summer Studentship programme. With guidance from the Museum’s Wikimedian in Residence, this second cohort of Wikipedia Interns will focus on improving and diversifying Auckland’s local history content on Wikipedia, particularly focusing on underrepresented places, people, and related topics. The project aligns with the new Aotearoa New Zealand Histories Curriculum and seeks to mirror Auckland’s cultural diversity, addressing gaps in knowledge representation and enhancing digital literacy, while also introducing a group of students to Wikipedia editing and the wider Wiki ecosystem.

The future of the Knowledge Equity Fund

The Knowledge Equity Fund was initially established as a one-time grantmaking fund to support racial equity initiatives and further free knowledge. No new funds have been added to the initial fund since it was first set aside in 2020. With the conclusion of Round 3, the Fund now has $815,000 USD left in the fund. The Equity Fund will run one last “round” in the next 4 months, where we will choose a handful of the most impactful grantees from the first rounds and provide them with a final “top up grant” to deepen their work with the movement and ensure that the content they create is present on the Wikimedia projects. 

With this final round, the committee will finish the grantmaking and close out the Equity Fund, and present our learnings about this experiment. We will be hosting a community call about Round 3 and the future of the Fund soon, and will share more information in the coming months about these forthcoming grants.