Early June, among fifteen other fellows, I was privileged to be offered the African Wikipedian Alliance (AWA) Inclusion and Climate Justice Fellowship 2025 under Code for Africa (CfA) in partnership with the Norwegian Embassy, focused on closing content gaps and amplifying African voices on Wikipedia, Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons, by creating or improving topics relating to gender equity, climate awareness and other sustainability efforts in Namibia, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe.
The fellowship began with a series of onboarding sessions for three days from June 18 to June 20, 2025. The onboarding sessions were all interactive and provided useful resources for a good start and a perfect finish, with emphasis on our duties and expected monthly deliverables as fellows. The official general virtual launch was held on June 25, 2025 with over 100 participants in attendance.
I proceeded to create an event page, my work plan, and dashboard to track all contributions during the project period. I recruited 13 participants who would work closely with me to achieve the project goals. After conducting a needs assessment to ascertain the editing history, strength and possible needs of my participants, it helped inform my decision in organizing training sessions, edit-a-thons and office hours. A number of the recruited participants were experienced Wikimedia editors, with just a few new editors. So far, I have hosted three training sessions between June 27 to June 30, on the basics of Wikipedia and Wikidata, core policies and guidelines, and how to contribute effectively. The monthly edit-a-thon is ongoing, and the contributions from editors so far have been encouraging.
One month down, five more to go! I’m excited to see how much we would achieve together in shaping the narrative around climate justice, gender equity, and LGBTQ+ rights in Southern Africa.
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