Visual Storytelling for Gender Equality:Africa Wiki Women IWD Campaign 2025

Across Africa, countless women are shaping the media and political landscape, yet their contributions remain underrepresented online. The Africa Wiki Women initiative is changing that narrative through the Accelerating Action for Gender Equality 2025 Campaign, a bold effort to bridge the gender content gap across Wikimedia projects.

Visual content is a powerful tool in storytelling and representation. The recent Wikimedia Commons training led by our Wikimedia commons trainer, Nwonwu Uchechukwu P, emphasized how uploading well-licensed, high-quality pictures of African women in journalism and politics can amplify their visibility and contributions on Wikimedia platforms. Properly categorizing and licensing these images ensures the content is accessible, reusable, and effectively linked to relevant articles and data.

As part of this campaign, the training equipped contributors with essential skills to help close the gender gap on Wikimedia projects. By encouraging community-driven content creation and increased visual representation, the campaign celebrates and documents African women in politics and journalism.

What Participants Learned

• How to upload images correctly, including adding detailed captions and selecting appropriate free licenses such as CC BY 4.0 or CC BY-SA 4.0
  
• The importance of categorizing images under the campaign’s dedicated category, “Images from Africa Wikimed IWD Campaign 2025”
  
• Licensing guidelines to ensure all files meet Wikimedia’s standards for free content
  
• Best practices for contributing images of notable African women in journalism and politics, aligned with the campaign’s goals.

Get Involved

Learn more about the campaign on the campaign page, and join our upcoming office hour on May 23rd for updates, questions, and support. Together, let’s celebrate and document the incredible stories of African women leaders.