Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Open Foundation West Africa Annual Plan 2022

Regional Committee Recommendations

Dear Open Foundation West Africa,

Thank you for submitting this grant application. The Middle East and Africa Regional Committee has reviewed your application and they have some follow-up questions and requests:

• How do you plan to address underrepresented communities, e.g. women?

Our programs have been designed to include and encourage underrepresented communities like women and disabled folks. Hence to address this, we are looking forward to doing the following:

• Having special awards categories for women during competitions to motivate and encourage women within the community to participate in our campaigns and including contests.
• We also have community-level awards during major competitions like AWC where community members within specific regions can compete amongst themselves. This we believe will encourage more new participants to join competitions to improve their editing skills and ensure inclusivity as they compete amongst their peers rather than competition with more experienced editors which often discourages them from participating.
• Special space on our newsletter to highlight communities voices especially women and newbies who are doing amazing work
• Partnering with institutions that primarily focus on gender topics and female groups. Some partners include Africa Women's Development Fund, SIS Code GH, Women's Haven, etc.
• Providing opportunities to accommodate childcare during training to allow all manners of people the ability to join our projects.
• Providing internet stipends/awards to deserving community members to address the connectivity challenges as well as providing PC’s for community members who need one to loan for contributions.
• We also make available other equipment such as cameras, drones and other equipment that ensures our community receives the needed support to participate.
• We tackle the different knowledge gaps within our community through mentorship after training to ensure even the shy ones get a chance to be at par with the rest of the community.

• We are curious to learn more about how else you involve the tech hubs beyond sharing office space.

Apart from sharing training spaces with tech hubs, we involve them in so many other ways which include;

• Offering training opportunities to their members and networks
• We involve resource persons from these Tech hubs to support specific programs and projects, more like capacitating their staff (teams) to be able to lead our projects
• The help us unlock access to specific audiences and partners
• We utilise their platforms to reach new audiences and unlock prospective participants within their networks or reach

• Kindly share with us your reserves policy.

Kindly see attached a link to OFWA Reserve Policy

• Would you let us know how you engaged the community in the development of this proposal?

We engaged our community members in the development of our program by collecting community feedback after each project, and also organising an annual survey to learn and understand what the needs of our communities are.

We also organize on different levels to target all the different kinds of participants that exist as members in our community. We organise activities such as the train the trainers sessions for all hub leaders (to build their capacities but more importantly learn about what is working or not), active members meetups (convening for all active members), town hall meetings, and info sessions at the hub levels just to learn what programs resonate with our communities, which programs need modifications and what new requests our communities have. These are all considered as final inputs and avenues to modify our program based on the community’s needs.

• We notice a lot of your programming has been consistent with that of last year and before and are curious to learn what innovation you seek to infuse in this year’s work.

We have carefully crafted these programs that make sense to our community and that our community can easily identify with. Consistency is key in brewing household initiatives that stays the test of time and are a brand in itself. These programs appeal to our community’s interest and are more likely to participate in, our programs are currently growing that familiarity that we envisaged and community members have it marked on their calendars and prepare annually for them (Africa Wiki Challenge, Founders Day Writing Contest, Wiki Loves Festivals, etc.).

Albeit our focus, we are poised to listen and improve our programs to suit our steadily growing community. These are a few innovations or initiatives we are taking in 2022 based on the data collected from our community:

• Initiating competition and participation at the lowest level possible (closer to our hub structures), through our regional or mini hub competitions which give out small awards. The point is to engage and increase participation of new members in our competition as they have consistently requested the need for such competitions at the hub levels.
• Incorporate more women by targeting women groups to increase participation of women in our programs.
• We have also realized that weekend training alone is not enough and may not be attended by all. Through our end of year survey we realized that some community members prefer weekday training and so we intend to organize two training sessions and that includes one weekday virtual training to go along with our weekend training to ensure maximum inclusivity. These virtual trainings will be recorded and can be reutilised by anyone who requires its use.
• We have designed our training to ensure newbies are always catered for while reducing redundancy for existing members (avoid same training over again). In each quarter the first months are noted for newbie training and these months are also free times (focus time windows) for existing members to make actual contributions or even help with mentoring/training newbies. The two other months teach something new (what we call progressive training) to ensure the newbie can plug into learning a new thing in the following months together with the existing members. So for example even if a newbie joined in the middle of the 1st quarter they will still have the chance to be trained in the 1st month of the 2nd quarter and follow through with other training.
• We also want to motivate participants who attend training by awarding them with banstars and certificates for completing specific training. This we believe will encourage others to join as they will also want to receive some recognition for their participation.

• We observed that there has been an increase in budget compared to last year, while we don't see any big difference between last year and this year in program work. Would you clarify this?

These past few years our desire and vision has been to expand and increase the reach of our projects across the country and sub-region. If you look closely at our grant application, you will notice that even though the name and strategy for our individual program umbrellas remain the same, our reach with those projects have increased significantly. Each of our programs possess a growth component that ensures a steady and organic growth over time. Since our last fiscal year, our regional hub networks have expanded significantly (increase in size of existing regional hubs) and there has also been an increase in number of new regional hubs, 6 new regional hubs in total (Bono East, UHAS, Tarkwa, Wa, Walewale, Winneba). What this means in budgetary (monetary) terms is an increase in our Community Development pocket (line request items) to cover the 6 new regional hubs as well as a request for funds to focus on growth into 3 new regions.

There was also the introduction of a couple of new content campaigns and capacity building programs which were not included in last year's budget, some of the programs include; Founders Day Writing Contest, College of Education Librarians Workshop, Community Fellowship Program, Africa Wikimedia Developers Project, etc. These are new programs that created new budgetary requirements for this year's budget request.

There have been new requests for additional staff, health insurance to cover staff and other budgetary adjustments to cater for the growing living expense adjustments in the country due to inflation and hike in prices of items and services. Our projects were affected last year due to a lack of anticipation of such changes. Lastly the introduction of new taxes such as rent taxes (which we have included this year) and COVID-19 levy on everything which affects prices of everything.

• We recommend reducing the staff costs especially seeing the scope of work seem to remain the same. It will be useful to learn if this recommendation is feasible.

We understand the point you are raising here but this may not be entirely feasible as your judgement is based on the assumption that our scope of work hasn’t changed that much. I believe carefully reading our answers on all the hidden changes within our consistent program above, may bring to light the increasing workload for our 1 man team. Just to summarise from the previous points around our program, though the program names stay the same and a few new program additions have been made, each of our programs have an embedded growth model that has significantly increased the programmatic work, community management and engagement work and other significant issues related to community health and safety.

Our 1 man team is made up of our Communication Officer (CO), the CO has been the one leading community engagement and management, program management and event and logistics management. From managing the printing of t-shirts for each program, figuring out who receives them as awards, coordinating a jury for our contests/campaigns, running regional and international campaigns, engaging the growing community (nearly a 1000 member count) on a daily basis via whats app, managing partners, managing our social media channels and promotions, leading media drives (representing on TV, Radio, etc.), sending out monthly newsletters and evaluating the impact of our projects. This increased work makes the current workload of the communication officer very unreasonable and not exactly what they signed up for.

This is why we think it is realistic to bring in a Program Manager to lift all the programmatic and logistical duties off the Communications Officer and to manage our growing portfolio of programs and projects. A dedicated Program Manager will also bring more focus and innovation to our programs. Find out more about this role in our staffing plan.

Lastly, as a requirement for setting up the Communications Officer (CO) role some years back there was the need to create a reporting role or supervisor. We created the Administrative Executive (AE) role as a volunteer role to whom the CO reports to and takes strategic leadership of the organisation. For more than 3 years this role has been occupied by volunteers and it has reached a point where we think it's useful to convert this role into a full time role, especially when we are requesting for a very needed addition to our staff capacity (making it 2). This AE role has always been the one to deliver the strategy of the board at OFWA, however, doing this in a volunteer capacity comes with its own limitations as sometimes availability is a challenge. The consequences are sometimes dire and can lead to missed opportunities. A dedicated AE means a focus on the organisational goals and strategy, a well managed staff, a sense of leadership in the organisation and a well managed growing portfolio of partners and key projects. At OFWA today, we manage all sorts of Wikimedia interventions that are currently not in the job descriptions of the current staff, and the AE will take on those responsibilities/portfolios. From providing fiscal support to other Wikimedia Affiliates (Wikimedia Sudan, Wikimedia Liberia, etc.), supporting key projects from the WMF (Wikidata4Education, WMF/AfroCrowd Project, etc.) to serving as a platform or ally for other aligned partners that share in our vision (creative commons, etc.)

• We encourage OFWA to explore ways of engaging more volunteers to support the work.

There are various ways we engage volunteers in our programs today but we are happy to take this encouragement and to fuel our goals of creating even more opportunities for volunteers to support the work that we do.

Please reach to the MEA regional officer to support you in making the needed changes to your proposal which are due by the end of day, 2nd of December 2021. Looking forward to hearing from you. On behalf of the Regional Committee. VThamaini (WMF) (talk) 09:55, 25 November 2021 (UTC)

Wikimedia Community Fund approved in the amount of 110,413.00 USD + 10% contingency

Congratulations! Your grant is approved in the amount of 110,413.00 USD + 10% contingency (121,454.30 USD), with a grant term starting 1 January 2022 and ending 31 December 2022.

We recognize the work of Open Foundation West Africa [ OFWA] done through open education and education programs, digitizing open resources, preserving cultural and heritage items for educational purposes and promoting contents about the West African region and existent countries.

We continue to see growth in the program development, partnership development and organizational capacity to support the work in the region. It was great learning about you taking time to consolidate and strengthen your work through identifying opportunities of innovation such as enriching your hub program, finding avenues of including more women in your programs, and developing training to support newcomers . We believe consolidation and strengthening efforts towards existing work poses an opportunity to foster efficiency and effectiveness.

After a thorough review of the request for increase in funds against the programs presented and planned impact goals, we are of the belief that the current funding level is appropriate and sufficient to support the current programmatic strategies and their intended outcomes.

It is our hope that with the requested resources, you will continue to develop processes and structures that enable you in staff and volunteer management, strengthening financial and people management practices amongst other organizational capacity aspects.

We encourage OFWA to explore different pathways of engaging volunteers in being part of the existing and new additions to the programs.

Thank you for your work and all you do for the community and Wikimedia movement.

Best regards from the MEA Regional Committee and Staff NANöR (talk) 11:09, 15 December 2021 (UTC)