Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Hausa Wikimedians User Group Annual Plan 2025 (renewal in 2024-25)

Feedback from the Middle East and Africa Regional Funding Committee regarding your application

Dear Hausa Wikimedians User Group,

Thank you very much for submitting an application for renewing your grant support in Round 1 FY 24/25 of the Wikimedia General Support Fund. We appreciate you taking the time to describe your activities and projects in support of the Wikimedia projects and the Wikimedia movement. The Regional Funds Committee has reviewed the proposal, and wishes to offer some initial feedback and questions for your review:

• The Committee recognizes that the user group plans on continuing exactly what you have been doing from the previous year, which aligns with the objective of a grant renewal.
• The Committee would appreciate that you break down your budget as was recommended in the previous year. This will allow the Committee to have a better understanding of your plan on spending your grant and will justify such expenses. The Committee would like a breakdown of the programmatic costs, the salaries, and a breakdown of the costs under the line item “Other” under the Operational Costs section.
• The Committee is interested in gathering more details about your microgrants program. How has that been going and may you share details about the progress and impact? How many members of the community have applied, how many have received microgrants and how much has been spent so far? We would like to see how you expend your microgrants budget - who applied, how did you disburse the funds, what was the impact, and any reports to share?
• May the user group further clarify how you solicit feedback from your community in developing your proposal. You mentioned having meetings, were these physical or online meetings, and how did you discuss the plan to gather community insights?
• The Committee would appreciate further clarification on the role of the coordinators, who are the coordinators and how are they recruited, what events have they coordinated and who will be the coordinators for the upcoming events?
• The Committee strongly advises that the Hausa Wikimedians includes a well-detailed strategic plan and annual plan that can support the optimization of resources and justifies your progress and how you plan on growing the following year.

Thank you and we look forward to hearing from you on the comments shared and if you would like to meet with the regional funding committee, please inform the program officer. FElgueretly-WMF (talk) 09:37, 1 November 2024 (UTC)

Hello FElgueretly-WMF, thank you and the committee for the feedback. Here’s our response to the bulleted points accordingly.

• Thank you.
• We have shared updated budget to include more detailed breakdown and correct figures. We have removed the 'other' line item.
• We have shared documentation on the impact of our Data Support program and the process itself for the concluded iteration in this Data Support program and also separately in Fluxx report. A more expanded report was also provided and shared with the Program officer earlier, it’s available here: Data Support Report (PDF).

  The expanded PDF report contains details of how the program works, the need for it and how applications are received and processed. It also gives overview of the review process and funds disbursement. These key processes that underpin the program have not changed significantly since the current Annual Plan is also renewal of last year’s; but we have improved in multiple areas to make it more impactful and easy to access based on user feedback and we believe that’s what lead to increase in participation in the program. For instance in the so far concluded rounds combined, we have received more applications than we did last year in whole. By the end of the Annual Plan year, we project the number of total applications to rise by 36% compared to the previous year.

  Earlier in the beginning of current year planning, as part of the improvements, we decided to increase the number of beneficiaries of the program to 100 and we have done 66% of that so far, the rest will be completed in the pending rounds. The expansion was informed based on analysis of the impact of the program, growth projection and the need for expansion as explained in the documents above in more detail. When the program is completed later this year, we plan to submit full impact report for it separately from our main Annual report as we did last year.

  We would like to note that the current iteration of the program (2024 Annual Plan) is ongoing and yet to be completed but in total we have so far supported 66 beneficiaries in 3 rounds. Round 4 is pending completion this week.

  On number of applications, this year alone the program has received 206 applications so far.  We projected to receive around 280 to 300 applications in total by the completion of the program. The applicants are Wikimedia editors most of whom primarily contribute to Hausa language projects. Applications are public and archived on-wiki indefinitely, here’s an example of the archive for one round in this year: Data Support round archive. The application statements are in Hausa language.

  On funds distribution, funds are disbursed directly from our organizational bank account to beneficiaries personal bank accounts which they provide during post-approval information submission. We have spent USD 1420 so far. We collect the details in a separate post-approval process so as to limit personald data collect to only the people who are actually going to receive the funds. The personal details of the beneficiaries (including feedback from them) are available in this (private) document Data Support Beneficiaries (Google Docs) which is shared with ssa_fundwikimedia.org and felgueretly-ctrwikimedia.org emails and can pass it to the committee. The list contains beneficiaries of fully concluded rounds only, so beneficiaries from remaining rounds would be added by our automated process in the coming weeks.

• We use both online and in-person meetings to discuss our initiatives and ensure that our proposal aligns with the needs of our community and have incorporated inputs from  diverse perspectives. But because of time and location constraints (members are based in different locations and it is not always easy to get the time that’s reasonably okay for everyone), we discuss more things online. We also actively engage our community members through our social media groups for rapid feedback collection and to ensure we involve a broad range of community members.
• We organize different kind of activities ranging from in-person events in multiple cities and different states, to contests (local and global Wikimedia contests), capacity building trainings, specialized trainings, outrach programs with external partners and various community and team meetings. These requires careful coordination and dedicated personnel for effective implementation. The event coordinator duty is to ensure this coordination for in-person events and is also responsible for developing detailed in-person event details, doing pre-event checks and discussing requirements with the rest of the team. They also work on provision or outsourcing of equipment and materials we need, a process which complexity varies greatly depending on the location and time of the event. The coordinator is User:Saifullahi AS. For the events they coordinated, these are the events we reported in our Annual report, they supported the implementation through the responsiblities explained above.

  Responsibilities for developing and supporting community-building initiatives, community relationship and editor recruitment lies with the Community Coordiantor who also oversees outreach activities and campaigns. Particularly also, the coordinator supports the program director to manage community development micro grants program and leads partnership projects as well as assist in general project implementation. The role is filled by Em-mustapha who is also one of the co-founders of the group.

  As we are renewing our application without big changes per the objectives and requirements of a grant renewal process, there would be no changes in these roles.

• Thank you and we acknowledge the Committee's advice. We are committed to developing comprehensive and long-term strategic plans and have already begun work on that with significant progress. We earlier hold on publishing strategic plans this round because we want to use the renewal method which in our conversation with the program officer made us to believe it's not necessary. Our plans can be seen here now.

Thank you and the committe for the question, we hope this response answers your questions and we are open to further discussion if you need more details from us. – Ammarpad (talk) 23:24, 18 November 2024 (UTC) (On behalf of Hausa Wikimedians UserGroup)

General Support Fund Approved at Local Currency Equivalent of 42,200 USD

Dear Hausa Wikimedians,

Thank you for submitting your grant proposal for the General Support Fund for Round 1 of FY 24/25. We deeply appreciate your dedication to championing edit-a-thons, capacity-building training, and the data support program, which are crucial for empowering your community and fostering local contributions to Wikimedia projects.

After a thorough review, the MEA Regional Funding Committee has approved 42,200 USD as a renewal for this funding round. While we are pleased with many aspects of your proposal, we request certain adjustments to align funding with your current capacity and impact.

Personnel costs. A significant portion of your budget is allocated to salaries, which currently take up nearly half of your total funding request. To optimize resources, we recommend that you reduce the number of paid roles from 5 to 2 key positions. This adjustment ensures more balanced spending across activities. We advise to limit total salary costs to 12,000 USD as part of your revised budget.

We commend your work and remain committed to supporting the Hausa Wikimedia community and once again, congratulations. These adjustments will help ensure sustainability and better alignment of resources with your impactful initiatives.

On behalf of the MEA Regional Funds Committee, FElgueretly-WMF (talk) 09:46, 14 December 2024 (UTC)