Building Visibility for African Women on Wikimedia: The EmpowerHer Fellowship

In commemoration of International Women’s Day 2026, the African Wikipedian Alliance, with support from Code for Africa, in partnership with the European Partnership for Democracy (EPD),  launched the EmpowerHer Fellowship 2026, a one-month fellowship aimed at addressing the persistent gender and content gaps across Wikimedia platforms.

Despite the growth of open knowledge, African women remain significantly underrepresented on platforms such as Wikipedia and Wikidata. Many notable figures, leaders, professionals, and changemakers are either missing or insufficiently documented. The EmpowerHer Fellowship 2026 responds to this gap by mobilising contributors to create and improve high-quality content that reflects the contributions of women across the continent.

Engaging Contributors

As an EmpowerHer 2026 fellow, my role is to coordinate contributor engagement focused on documenting notable women from Chad, Ethiopia, and South Sudan, countries where representation gaps are particularly evident. This includes recruiting participants, onboarding both new and experienced editors, and facilitating training sessions and office hours to support sustained contribution.

A key component of this work is a structured research process to identify notable subjects for documentation. This involves reviewing existing content gaps on Wikipedia, analysing Wikidata entries, and consulting credible secondary sources such as news platforms, institutional records, and public archives.

To streamline participation and ensure quality, I will curate a targeted list of topics for contributors. Each entry will include essential metadata, such as country and available sources, to guide contributors and ensure that all outputs meet Wikipedia’s notability and verifiability standards.

Beyond content creation, the fellowship is designed as a capacity-building initiative. Contributors will be equipped with the skills required to identify notable topics, develop well-sourced articles, and contribute structured data to Wikidata. This approach ensures that the impact of the project extends beyond immediate outputs to long-term community growth.

By the end of the fellowship, the project aims to:

• Create and improve at least 30 articles and Wikidata items
• Strengthen contributor capacity across participating communities
• Foster a more inclusive and collaborative editing environment

At its core, EmpowerHer is about representation and equity in knowledge production. It is about ensuring that African women are visible, documented, and recognised within global knowledge systems.

As the fellowship begins, it sets the stage for meaningful contributions that not only close content gaps but also amplify voices that have long been underrepresented.