Rites, Rituals, and Rapid Grants: What We Learned Running Wiki Loves Africa’s New Grants Pathway

For the second year running, the Wikimedia Foundation ran the grant-making process for Wiki Loves Africa (WLA) through the New Grants Pathway — a decentralised, community-led funding model built with the Wikimedia Foundation that allows those doing the work to make funding decisions. This year’s contest theme, Rites and Rituals, asked contributors across the continent to document the ceremonies, initiation rites, harvest festivals, and traditional practices that define community life in their Africa. The grants existed to make this documentation possible, covering training, photo walks, upload sessions, and the outreach needed to do it all respectfully.

With the 2026 cycle’s review, disbursement, and early implementation completed, we wanted to share what the numbers tell us, what grantees and reviewers told us, and what we’re planning to change for next time.

The Pathway, in Numbers

33	Applications received
14	Funded or partially funded (41% approval rate)
$33,874.76	Awarded of $122,882.44 requested
10+	Countries and communities represented
13	Wikimedians on the review panel, across nine African countries

Final upload and contributor counts will be confirmed once the campaign closes, but the grant-making numbers above are settled.

How Applications Were Reviewed

Thirty-three applications came in from organisers in 14 countries, with Nigeria alone accounting for 20 of them — a reflection of how active Nigerian Wikimedia communities have become, but also a true test of the pathway’s capacity to handle volume without losing rigour.

A panel of 13 experienced Wikimedians, spanning nine African countries plus France, reviewed every application against six criteria: 

• clarity and impact, 
• organiser capacity, 
• community engagement, 
• learning and evaluation, 
• budget realism; 
• and fit with the Rites and Rituals theme. 

Reviewers worked across English and French, with Francophone and Anglophone applications routed to dedicated reviewers to avoid language becoming a barrier to fair assessment.

Each application landed in one of four outcomes: 

• full approval, 
• partial funding, 
• “see comments” (where applicants could respond to specific concerns); 
• or decline. 

Of the 33, 3 were approved in full, 11 received partial funding, and 19 were declined — most commonly for unclear budgets, incomplete team information, duplication with other applications from the same area, or eligibility issues such as a team member being blocked on a Wikimedia project.

Who Got Funded, and Why It Worked

The strongest applications shared the following traits: experienced teams with verifiable Wikimedia contribution histories, budgets sized to what the activities actually needed, and a clear sense of place. Wikimedia Togo’s project — the only one funded at the full requested amount — paired two photo walks with professional photography training and use of the ISA tool to strengthen metadata, run by a team with a track record of delivering.

Collaboration also stood out as a quality signal. A multi-community Nigerian project bringing together the Igbo Wikimedians Commons Hub, Wiki for Senior Citizens Network Nigeria, and the Tyap Wikimedians User Group was commended as one of the strongest Nigerian submissions, precisely because it pooled experience across groups rather than competing for the same funding pool. The Fulfulde Wikimedians in Yobe State made a similar case for lean, realistic budgeting — their full request of $1,626 was approved without reduction because the plan to document 300–400 culturally relevant images was matched by a budget that made sense for the context.

What Grantees Told Us

Post-disbursement surveys with funded grantees gave us a window into the lived experience of the pathway. Funds arrived on time in every case reviewed, typically within one to three days of the expected date. Average self-reported confidence in project success sat at 9.2 out of 10 — strong, even where budgets had been trimmed.

That said, budget reductions had real consequences. Grantees running multi-region projects — in Zimbabwe, Senegal, and a multi-university initiative in Nigeria — told us the cuts forced them to narrow scope, whether that meant fewer regions, fewer universities, or shorter travel radii. Several also flagged practical risks for the activities ahead: connectivity for upload sessions in rural and northern Nigerian communities, and safety considerations for photo walks in the Niger Delta, where one grantee planned to use a police escort.

What Reviewers Told Us

Seven of the thirteen reviewers completed our post-review survey, and their feedback was candid. Every respondent rated WLA’s communication and the clarity of guidelines as good or very good, and all said they’d review again. But they were equally clear about what strained the process: a noticeable share of applications leaned heavily on AI-generated text with little human customisation behind it, producing vague activities and generic metrics that were easy to spot and hard to fund. Reviewers also flagged incomplete team details — missing Wikimedia usernames made it impossible to verify an applicant’s contribution history — and budgets that over-invested in administrative costs at the expense of the documentation work itself.

Their recommendations were practical: a proper reviewer orientation at the start of each cycle, earlier notice of review assignments, and a cap of one active application per community to cut down on duplication — particularly relevant given that the 20 Nigerian applications required a dedicated sub-committee just to adjudicate overlapping proposals.

Where the Model Held, and Where It Strained

The pathway’s core premise — that funding decisions belong close to the communities doing the work — held up well. The clearest successes came from teams with prior Wikimedia experience and genuine local knowledge of the cultural sites and consent processes the theme required. Light-touch, proportionate reporting allowed grantees to focus on delivery rather than paperwork.

Where it strained was at volume and at the edges of eligibility. Twenty applications from one country, some duplicating each other, asked more of the review process than it was built for in a compressed end-of-year timeline. And there’s no current way to check, before an application is even submitted, whether a listed team member is blocked or banned on a Wikimedia project or ineligible from getting a rapid grant from Wikimedia Foundation — several otherwise viable Nigerian proposals were declined for exactly this reason, late in the process.

Suggestions for Change

• An automated eligibility pre-check against platform blocks and bans, run at the point of application intake.
• Calls for proposals issued at least eight weeks ahead of review, with a live reviewer orientation session in addition to recorded materials.
• Sample budgets and annotated model applications, so first-time applicants can see what a well-scoped budget looks like before they write their own.
• A tiered grant structure under consideration — a smaller entry tier for first-time organisers alongside the standard tier for established communities.

Why This Matters Beyond WLA

Wiki Loves Africa’s New Grants Pathway is a small-scale test of a bigger idea: that subsidiarity — pushing funding decisions down to the people closest to the work — produces better cultural documentation than centralised grant-making could on its own. Two cycles in, the evidence supports that. The model is scalable to more countries and more themes, but only if reviewer capacity and intake systems grow alongside it. That’s the work ahead.

We’re grateful to the 13 reviewers who gave their time, the grantees who trusted the process and shared their honest feedback, and the Wikimedia Foundation’s Sub-Saharan Africa team for partnering with us on this model. If you organise in your community and are curious about applying in a future cycle, reach out — we’d love to hear from you.

Learn more

• Wiki Loves Africa 2026 — Participating Communities on Meta-wiki
• Wiki Loves Africa upload statistics on Toolforge