Grants:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/Rapid Fund/Swahili Shesaid Campaign 2026 (ID: 23939112)
This is an automatically generated Meta-Wiki page. The page was copied from Fluxx, the web service of Wikimedia Foundation Funds, where the user has submitted their application. Please do not make any changes to this page because all changes will be removed after the next update. Use the discussion page for your feedback. The page was created by CR-FluxxBot.
Applicant Details
[edit]- Main Wikimedia username. (required)
Surv_Melch (talk • accounts • contributions • edit count)
- Organization
N/A
- If you are a group or organization leader, board member, president, executive director, or staff member at any Wikimedia group, affiliate, or Wikimedia Foundation, you are required to self-identify and present all roles. (required)
N/A
- Describe all relevant roles with the name of the group or organization and description of the role. (required)
Main Proposal
[edit]- 1. Please state the title of your proposal. This will also be the Meta-Wiki page title.
Swahili Shesaid Campaign 2026
- 2. and 3. Proposed start and end dates for the proposal.
2026-10-01 - 2026-11-01
- 4. Where will this proposal be implemented? (required)
Tanzania
- 5. Are your activities part of a Wikimedia movement campaign, project, or event? If so, please select the relevant project or campaign. (required)
SheSaid
- 6. What is the change you are trying to bring? What are the main challenges or problems you are trying to solve? Describe this change or challenges, as well as main approaches to achieve it. (required)
Last year's Swahili SheSaid campaign made real progress. The 2026 edition is picking up where it left off, this time zeroing in on African women activists and making sure their words actually exist in Swahili, where millions of people can find them. These women have been at the center of fights for human rights, gender equality, environmental protection, education, peace, democracy, and social justice. Their speeches and writings have moved people to act. And yet, if you visit Swahili Wikiquote today, you'll find very little of what they've said. That's a real problem. It means Swahili-speaking communities are largely cut off from the wisdom and advocacy of women who've shaped entire societies. Their words exist — just not in a language that reaches everyone who should hear them. Swahili She Said 2026 is here to fix that. The campaign will gather, translate, and document notable quotes from women activists, giving those words a permanent home on Swahili Wikiquote. The goal isn't just archiving, it's making sure young women and girls can look up to someone who looks like them, speaks up like them, and builds something worth continuing.
Main Challenges The quotes simply aren't there. Visit Swahili Wikiquote incubator today and you'll find a thin collection of quotes from women activists — if you find any at all. When that content is missing, so is the evidence of everything these women fought for. Their work in social justice, human rights, and community building quietly disappears from the record.
Most people don't know they can contribute — or how. Wikiquote isn't complicated, but it does have a process: finding the right sources, verifying them, following the platform's guidelines. Many community members have never been walked through any of it, which means fewer people participate and the content that does exist grows slowly, if at all.
The language barrier is doing real damage. A lot of the most powerful quotes from women activists were said or written in English, French, Arabic, or Portuguese. That's fine — except it means Swahili speakers are effectively locked out. The words exist, but not in a form that reaches the communities who need them most.
Women are still being left out of the digital record. African and Tanzanian women activists in particular remain underrepresented across online knowledge platforms. It's a gap that compounds over time — the less they appear, the easier it becomes to overlook their achievements entirely, and the harder it gets for the next generation to find them.
- 7. What are the planned activities? (required) Please provide a list of main activities. You can also add a link to the public page for your project where details about your project can be found. Alternatively, you can upload a timeline document. When the activities include partnerships, include details about your partners and planned partnerships.
1. Research and Identify Quotes Everything starts with digging. Participants will search through books, interviews, speeches, articles, and official publications to find notable women activists from Tanzania, Africa, and beyond — and track down quotes that are sourced, verifiable, and worth documenting. No guesswork, no unverified claims. Just voices that deserve to be on record, actually put on record.
2. Translation into Swahili Finding a quote is only half the work. If it lives only in English, French, or Arabic, most Swahili speakers will never encounter it. So every selected quote goes through a careful translation process one that doesn't just swap words but preserves the original meaning, tone, and context. The goal is for a reader in Dar es Salaam or Mbeya to experience the quote the same way it was intended.
3. Training and Capacity Building A lot of people want to contribute but don't quite know where to start. The campaign will run training sessions, edit-a-thons, and mentorship activities to change that covering everything from finding reliable sources and verifying quotes to building Wikiquote pages and staying within Wikimedia guidelines. Whether someone is brand new or has edited before, there's something here to sharpen their skills.
4. Content Creation and Improvement This is where research and training turn into something real. Participants will create new Wikiquote pages for women activists and clean up or expand existing ones. More pages, better sourced, more visible — that's the measure. Every addition chips away at the gap that's left these voices underrepresented for too long.
5. Community Engagement and Awareness The campaign won't stay quietly in the background. Through social media, Wikimedia channels, and direct outreach, the project will bring in women, youth, students, activists, and Wikimedia contributors who care about getting this right. The wider the conversation, the more people show up — and the more voices get documented.
6. Mentorship and Contributor Support Joining a new platform can be overwhelming, and enthusiasm alone doesn't always get people past the first few edits. That's why experienced Wikimedians will be available throughout the campaign to guide contributors, answer questions, and help troubleshoot. It's not just about getting contributions in — it's about making sure the people who show up actually stay.
- 8. Describe your team. Please provide their roles, Wikimedia Usernames and other details. (required) Include more details of the team, including their roles, usernames, Wikimedia group, and whether they are salaried, volunteers, consultants/contractors, etc. Team members involved in the grant application need to be aware of their involvement in the project.
SurvMelch – Project Lead SurvMelch brings over three years of hands-on Wikimedia experience to this campaign. He's been part of Wiki Loves Africa, WikiForHumanRights, and — most relevantly — the SheSaid Campaign, where he helped organize the 2023 Tanzania edition before going on to lead the 2025 campaign himself. He knows this work from the inside: the community engagement, the editor training, the behind-the-scenes coordination that makes a campaign actually land. That track record is what makes him the right person to lead Swahili She Said 2026.
Pellagia Njau – Project Advisor
Pellagia has been editing Swahili Wikipedia since 2017, and in that time she's been involved in nearly every major Wikimedia campaign running through Tanzania and across the continent — WikiForHumanRights, SheSaid, Wiki Loves Women, 1Lib1Ref, Wiki Loves Africa, Wiki Loves Monuments. That breadth of experience isn't just impressive on paper; it means she understands how these campaigns succeed and where they can go wrong. As Project Advisor, she'll bring that perspective to bear through strategic guidance, mentorship, and making sure the campaign stays on track from start to finish.
Husseyn Issa – Campaign Coordinator
An active Tanzanian Wikimedian, he's spent time in the trenches of training sessions, edit-a-thons, and community outreach particularly focused on bringing younger contributors into the fold. He understands how to keep people engaged beyond a single event and how to hold the moving pieces of a campaign together. In Swahili She Said 2026, he'll handle facilitation, participant engagement, and day-to-day coordination, keeping the training sessions and community events running smoothly.
- 9. Who are the target participants and from which community? How will you engage participants before and during the activities? How will you follow up with participants after the activities? (required)
The campaign is built for women, youth, and first-time contributors from Swahili-speaking communities, especially those who haven't yet found their footing in the Wikimedia movement. Before anything kicks off, we'll be out there making noise: through local networks, social media, and direct outreach to universities, libraries, and women-led organizations. The goal is simple: make sure the right people know this exists and feel welcome enough to show up. Once the campaign is running, participants won't just be sitting through presentations. The workshops both online and in-person — are designed to be hands-on from the start. People will edit, contribute, ask questions, and work alongside more experienced Wikimedians who are there to help, not lecture. By the end, participants walk away with real skills and, ideally, connections to a community they'll want to stay part of.
- 10. Does your project involve work with children or youth? (required)
No
- 10.1. Please provide a link to your Youth Safety Policy. (required) If the proposal indicates direct contact with children or youth, you are required to outline compliance with international and local laws for working with children and youth, and provide a youth safety policy aligned with these laws. Read more here.
N/A
- 11. How did you discuss the idea of your project with your community members and/or any relevant groups? Please describe steps taken and provide links to any on-wiki community discussion(s) about the proposal. (required) You need to inform the community and/or group, discuss the project with them, and involve them in planning this proposal. You also need to align the activities with other projects happening in the planned area of implementation to ensure collaboration within the community.
I have informed the Tanzania Wikimedia Community about this project through WhatsApp and Telegram groups. Individual Swahili editors from both mainland Tanzania and Zanzibar who are interested in the SheSaid Campaign held discussions with User:Afeq91, who provided guidance on implementation, planning, and execution. Together, we also discussed how to strengthen our plans to ensure the successful organization and delivery of the events
- 12. Does your proposal aim to work to bridge any of the content knowledge gaps (Knowledge Inequity)? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Content Gender gap
- 13. Does your proposal include any of these areas or thematic focus? Select one option that most applies to your work. (required)
Gender and diversity
- 14. Will your work focus on involving participants from any underrepresented communities? Select one option that most apply to your work. (required)
Gender Identity
- 15. In what ways do you think your proposal most contributes to the Movement Strategy 2030 recommendations. Select one that most applies. (required)
Provide for Safety and Inclusion
Learning and metrics
[edit]- 17. What do you hope to learn from your work in this project or proposal? (required)
This campaign isn't just about hitting targets — it's also a chance to learn. We want to understand what actually works when it comes to closing the visibility gap for women's voices on Swahili Wikiquote, and more importantly, how to keep contributors engaged long after the campaign wraps up. These are the questions we'll be sitting with throughout:
Does our outreach actually reach the people we're trying to reach? We want to know which strategies are genuinely bringing in new contributors especially women and youth and which ones are just creating noise.
What does it take to build lasting confidence? Training during a campaign is one thing. We want to find out which methods and support structures give participants the skills and self-assurance to keep editing on their own once the workshops are done.
Does writing in Swahili make a real difference? We believe it does — but we want to see the evidence. How much does creating and improving Swahili-language entries actually expand who can access and connect with women's voices in our communities?
What keeps people coming back? Recognition, prizes, peer support there are different ways to motivate contributors. We want to find out which of these actually sticks and builds the kind of commitment that carries into future Wikimedia campaigns.
- 18. What are your Wikimedia project targets in numbers (metrics)? (required)
| Other Metrics | Target | Optional description |
|---|---|---|
| Number of participants | 40 | |
| Number of editors | 35 | |
| Number of organizers | 3 |
| Wikimedia project | Number of content created or improved |
|---|---|
| Wikipedia | |
| Wikimedia Commons | |
| Wikidata | |
| Wiktionary | |
| Wikisource | |
| Wikimedia Incubator | |
| Translatewiki | |
| MediaWiki | |
| Wikiquote | 70 |
| Wikivoyage | |
| Wikibooks | |
| Wikiversity | |
| Wikinews | |
| Wikispecies | |
| Wikifunctions or Abstract Wikipedia |
- Optional description for content contributions.
N/A
- 19. Do you have any other project targets in numbers (metrics)? (optional)
No
| Main Open Metrics | Description | Target |
|---|---|---|
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
| N/A | N/A | N/A |
- 20. What tools would you use to measure each metrics? Please refer to the guide for a list of tools. You can also write that you are not sure and need support. (required)
Outreach dashboard, event registration tool and Google Form.
Financial proposal
[edit]- 21. Please upload your budget for this proposal or indicate the link to it. (required)
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1sMyzT2BUzYFWA5iTMKNnwDnHjwVuUKoZCpF-myea4NQ/edit?gid=0#gid=0
- 22. and 22.1. What is the amount you are requesting for this proposal? Please provide the amount in your local currency. (required)
8253254 TZS
- 22.2. Convert the amount requested into USD using the Oanda converter. This is done only to help you assess the USD equivalent of the requested amount. Your request should be between 500 - 5,000 USD.
3139.03 USD
- By submitting your proposal/funding request you confirm that you have read and agree to the Application Privacy Statement, WMF Friendly Space Policy, and the Universal Code of Conduct.
Yes
Endorsements and Feedback
[edit]Please add endorsements and feedback to the grant discussion page only. Endorsements added here will be removed automatically.
Community members are invited to share meaningful feedback on the proposal and include reasons why they endorse the proposal. Consider the following:
- Stating why the proposal is important for the communities involved and why they think the strategies chosen will achieve the results that are expected.
- Highlighting any aspects they think are particularly well developed: for instance, the strategies and activities proposed, the levels of community engagement, outreach to underrepresented groups, addressing knowledge gaps, partnerships, the overall budget and learning and evaluation section of the proposal, etc.
- Highlighting if the proposal focuses on any interesting research, learning or innovation, etc. Also if it builds on learning from past proposals developed by the individual or organization, or other Wikimedia communities.
- Analyzing if the proposal is going to contribute in any way to important developments around specific Wikimedia projects or Movement Strategy.
- Analysing if the proposal is coherent in terms of the objectives, strategies, budget, and expected results (metrics).