Grants:Project/Wiki In Africa/Wiki Loves Women 2018/Final/WLWTanzania

Wiki Loves Women Tanzania Report

Project Impact

From the first event on September 2018 to April 2019, Wiki Loves Women Tanzania has managed to complete over 70+ articles of notable women in Tanzania. Wiki Loves Women project in Tanzania has also managed to increase the number of volunteers in Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects including Wiki Loves Women where up to 60+ new volunteers were added with 72% of them being women. The awareness went viral more to university students who were excited to join the movement and be part of all other upcoming projects. The project has managed at last to attract partners who shown interests in the future of Wiki Loves Women activities in Tanzania, this includes media, NGOs dealing with Gender gaps, Women initiative projects and other strategic supporters such as Swedish embassy in Tanzania and Goethe Institut Tanzania.

With Wiki Loves Women, women to women chats events, we managed to invite young women to meet notable women who agreed to have a chat and hack around the future notable women.

Team:

• Team leader: Maryam assisted by Iddy
• Training events manager: Antoni (assisted by Iddy)
• Database manager: Maryam (assisted by Iddy)
• Content manager: Antoni (assisted by Iddy)
• Marketing manager: Maryam (assisted by Antoni)
• Media communications and liaison at a local and the national level: Iddy (assisted by Antoni)
• Partner liaison: Iddy (assisted by Maryam)

Tanzania specific links:

• Wikimedia Community Usergroup Tanzania Page
• Wikimedia Tanzania

Social Media links

• Facebook : https://www.facebook.com/Wikimediatz/

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Targets

Our target included to run 10 events within 9 months of the project and write a minimum of 50 articles about notable women in Tanzania and in order to achieve that target we were supposed to hold one event per every month, and this included having groups of editors writing about notable women in Tanzania by using both english and Swahili language with much focus of expanding Swahili Wikipedia. Our activities in general included creating database of users, media and organisation that are (or) will be interested in WLW activities in future. Alsowe were able to raise the awareness of Wiki Loves Women movements and Wikimedia projects in Tanzania by using social media, editathons, workshops, word of mouth, social chats and all other possible means to make sure that we achieve the general goal of improving gender equality in Tanzania.

We are excited that we were able to achieve our goal beyond its initial target by reaching a number of women, and new women volunteers in Wikimedia projects. Numerically we were able to raise the participation of Women in Wiki Loves Women project and Wikimedia projects (mainly Wikipedia) by 72%, new volunteers in total were added by 53% with the addition of 70+.articles about notable Women in Tanzania.

Planned measure of success (include numeric target, if applicable)	Actual result	Explanation
Encouraging the contribution of quality information on Tanzanian women to be published on, and made widely available via, Wikipedia.	Increased the visibility of women’s quality information in Tanzania using mainly Swahili Wikipedia as a platform for content creation.	We are happy that this was a great story of success especially when it comes to Women related matters in Tanzania. Also the encouraging thing is that the number of impacted women was increased and they were inspired starting to learn on how they can take this opportunity to contribute in Wikipedia about their fellow women.
Involvement of Women in Leadership roles	We were able to involve women as leaders, partners and editors, whilst supporting all gender-sensitised editors to participate.	We are excited and encouraged by the response of women as they have shown good interest in leading activities and giving out their thoughts about different issues during the project. Generally, this went well and we hope this will improve more in future projects like this will be continued.

Story

Looking back we see a lot. One of the Inspiring moments is that we were so super excited and energetic to execute Wiki Loves Women project in Tanzania but all of the sudden Power went OFF at a very launching day, everyone was like Ohh...but a few minutes later our vibe was restored after we migrated to another venue. Another inspiring moment we were when we reached 50 articles as we were on our fifth event, we realised that for the past five events we were only seating and writing and it was not fun anymore, yes there was food, good places where we host our events, speedy internet and all the resources we needed for then. We then thought how about we get to meet this notable woman?, by hearing their stories and how they managed to be where they are?, this changed everything, events like Her2Her Chat, and others were the twist of our activities for the purpose of increasing inclusivity of Women as well as using the notable women as good ambassadors to raise awareness of Wiki Loves Women project and Wikimedia projects without changing the initial target. The 8th and 10th event managed to pull in over 60 attendees who transformed to be volunteers at the end, that's not all, the stories of notable women and hacks were the key of inspiration to those who attended and served as a good ground for the notable women to understand better the idea of what real is Wiki Loves Women.

Survey(s)

If you used surveys to evaluate the success of your project, please provide a link(s) in this section, then briefly summarize your survey results in your own words. Include three interesting outputs or outcomes that the survey revealed.

After the end of each event, we had some few minutes of reflection with the volunteers. The reflection concentrated on questions like how was the event, what worked well, what didn't work well and what would the volunteers like to see on the next event. That helped us much to arrange what would work best for the upcoming events.

Methods and activities

The approach of Team work helped us much

• Maintaining punctuality to activities
• Tolerance was one of the key principles as not always things goes smoothly
• Being always creativeness to what will work best for the project to bear fruit.
• Persuasive is another way we used to follow up things and ensuring everything goes as planned.

Project resources

Hapa tunaweka links za social media tu, hata wikipedia kule tulipoweka images, ama videos.

Social channels

Facebook:

• 1 Wiki Loves Women Tanzania
• 2 Wikimedia Tanzania

Instagram:Wikimedia Tanzania
Twitter:https://twitter.com/wiki_tza
Google drive:Wlw Tz Photos

Learning / What worked well

What worked well

Transport support to volunteers

Since volunteers are offering their time sometimes its difficult for some to pay for themselves for transport from where they stay to where the entire user group meet for editathons, hence transport support helps brings inclusivity and encourages volunteers to attend more meetups and events.

Hosting venues

How venues feels and looks like as well as to what extent volunteers and attendees will feel safe with their belongings all matters, this also include the accessibility of the venue and other resources venue can offer. In our case all went better as we had good venues.

Food and drinks

For all long events, we had delicious food/snacks from morning till closing of the events with good variety of choices to suit everyone. This is one of the key fuels to support people moving, we had a term “Wiki Cafe is Open” and at every session or event we will make sure that every attendee get enough of it.

Events designing

Rather than having just normal events, we tried our best to be creative as much as we could and a key was to get attendees engaged with activities that aimed to build their interest to become volunteers which worked well, these activities involved hacking around wikipedia tools, thinking and table chats.

Notable women on stage

Inviting notable women to be part of editing experience and hearing their story was a boost to more young women and other volunteers as well this type of engagement added an impact on the number of volunteers and raised impact to young women.

Reaching more volunteers

We were able to reach more volunteers and audience of different career backgrounds

What didn’t work well

Too many project reporting tools:

Some of the tools were difficult to understand their purpose as well some of them they were not familiar with the project organizers which led to relative lower efficiency to update some of them as it needs more time to update every tool for the same activity.

Suggestion: We suggest some to be removed, or there should be at least a week of project management orientation for the organising team before starting a particular project.

Partnership support:

The announcement of project came in a bit late our experience shows that by July of every year most of the potential partners closes their annual plans for that particular year, hence if any new decision where to be presented to them will have to be between March and July. This made some of strategic partners not to be able to chip in during the run of the project.

Suggestion: Early announcement of the projects, or working with corporates calendar.

Finding Women related content:

Sometimes it was difficult to find some of the content for notable women, this includes scarcity of documented references to backup their articles and their corresponding photos for the notable women who we had on our database.

Suggestion: On our end, we had to invite notable women on our events, and take photos that we uploaded to Wikimedia for free use. This might not work everywhere but in our case it worked well for those women attended.

Grants / Finance Delays:

There were some delays on financial support as finance support was coming in batches, which is good, but some arrived late which led the team to reschedule some of the events as well in some cases we had to use some of our money to support the events to keep up the consistent of volunteers morality.

Suggestion: Finance support should be in time as possible in order not to interrupt volunteers schedules through postponement and rescheduling of events.

Press release and Media:

This would’ve been a good thing to do but we had some reasons including politics as well as to avoid government penalties as the project was not registered under any organisation in Tanzania.

Suggestion: We had to keep it on social media, also through an internal database, since it was a long project. Also, more knowledge should be given to organizers on how to makes these projects legally registered so as to get the freedom to publicly promote through press media.

Next steps and opportunities

On the last event few questions came up from the audience and volunteers, “Is this the end or there will be more Wiki Loves Women project in Tanzania?” this line has came across us several times as we were heading toward the last (10th) Event. This suggests that if possible there should be a continuation of this project as its still needed to ensure the encouragement of the contribution of quality information on Tanzanian women to be published on, and made widely available via, Wikipedia continues.