Grants talk:Programs/Wikimedia Community Fund/General Support Fund/Wikimedia Nigeria Foundation Inc- Annual Activities Multiyear Grant 2026-2028

-Feedback regarding your application-

Latest comment: 3 months ago3 comments3 people in discussion

Feedback regarding your application

Dear Wikimedia Nigeria,

Thank you very much for your application, and we appreciate that your grant application focuses on introducing strategic adjustments to your ongoing programs and developing new, pragmatic programs, drawing on the lessons learned from the 2025 activities. This proposal demonstrates a strategic progression, aiming for broader impact through enhanced training, increased content creation, and strengthened community engagement. It is clear that through this proposal, Wikimedia User Group Nigeria would like to continue with free knowledge creation, promotion, and equitable participation, and ensure that Nigerian content and communities have a prominent and sustainable presence in the global Wikimedia movement.

The WMF Community Resources team and the Sub-Saharan Africa Regional Funds Committee have convened to review your application, and we have the following points for feedback before reaching a final decision. Upon reviewing your application, we would like to bring your attention to some points:

The Committee would like to recognize that the strength of your proposal lies in its clear focus on continuing to activate and support communities by providing opportunities for them to host tailored outreach, host their own training, highlight contributions, develop their governance and internal support systems and celebrate their achievements.

However, some of the concerns raised by the Committee are listed below:

There is a lot of gender disparity in the decision-making team. Almost all the team members are male, and a less significant role is assigned to the female gender. The Committee sees no full representation in gender balance. Between February 18 and 22, 2025, the Wikimedia User Group Nigeria held its strategic meeting in Lagos, Nigeria, to assess the community’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges. The Committee would like to know if the recommendation related to gender representation in the Senior Management Team has been discussed during the strategic meeting, and if yes, what steps or decisions have you taken to address the issue?

Responses

The senior management team currently includes the three Co-Founders, the Executive Director, the Program Director, the Grant Manager, and the Content Manager. The three Co-Founders, who are male, serve in volunteer capacities as Community Director, Learning and Evaluation Director, and Fan Club and Network Director. The Executive Director, Grant Manager, and Content Manager are female, resulting in a 4:3 male-to-female representation in senior leadership. The Grant Manager and Content Manager were appointed on 18 September, 2025 following over two years of service as junior officers, during which they demonstrated strong capacity and readiness for senior roles. Their progression reflects our commitment to developing internal talent and increasing women’s leadership within the organisation.

We recognise the importance of inclusive leadership and balanced decision-making. While the Co-Founders’ roles remain volunteer-based, we are committed to strengthening gender balance as we grow. Going forward, we will actively prioritise qualified female candidates for new or expanded senior management positions to enhance diversity, representation, and inclusiveness across the organisation.

Questions

The committee members noticed that most of the activities proposed are too ambitious. Kindly outline key activities that will greatly impact the community so that the Committee can analyze them in case of a limited budget.

Responses

We appreciate the Committee’s feedback regarding the scope of our proposed activities. While further clarification on which specific activities were considered “too ambitious” would be helpful, we would like to reaffirm that the proposed programs were developed in alignment with the Wikimedia User Group Nigeria Strategic Plan (2026–2029).

The program design intentionally prioritises:
Preventing volunteer burnout
Ensuring realistic, manageable implementation
Maximising value for resources invested

Each activity targets different segments of our community based on identified needs. In the event of budget limitations, we have highlighted below the key programs that will deliver the most significant impact and can be prioritised accordingly;

Community Capacity Building Workshops – Focused on developing leadership, technical, and organisational skills among members.
Campaigns and contests – Focused on creating content, recruitment of new editors and community engagement through campaigns and contests
Outreach and Partnerships – Engaging with educational institutions and cultural organisations to expand Wikimedia awareness and collaborations.
Support for Language Communities – Through the Nigerian Wikipedia Quality Improvement Program (QWIP), we aim to strengthen local-language Wikipedias and promote inclusivity in free knowledge creation.
Community support and volunteer recognition:

Microgrant support: To provide financial support on a micro-scale for Nigerian mission-aligned organisations, individual members of the Wikimedia User Group Nigeria, fan clubs, and organised groups contributing to any Wikimedia projects.
Monthly Outstanding Editor Recognition (MOER) and Wikimedia Nigeria Community Award': To recognise volunteers who are working tirelessly to support free knowledge

Wiki Fan Clubs and Network support - Support the sustainability of existing and growing new fan clubs
Nigerian Oral History Documentation Projects - Collection and digitisation of oral history of Nigerian indigenous languages, making them available under a Creative Commons License for Educational Purposes.
Train-the-Trainer Programs - The aim is to build a pool of skilled Wikimedia trainers who can deliver high-quality Wikimedia-related training to community members across Nigerian-language Wikipedia communities.
Wiki-Election Nigeria: Combating Election Misinformation with Wikimedia Projects and making available, up-to-date information and knowledge about the Nigeria election
WikiHeritage Fellowship: A fellowship program for Young Nigerian professionals organised to solve a unique problem.

These are the major activities of our annual plan and will have the greatest long-term impact on our community’s growth and sustainability.

Questions

The Committee noticed that in the previous cycle, you proposed an ‘’Animation Project’’. Would you kindly confirm if you are planning to continue with the project, and if yes, how had the community members benefited from the previous implementation and how will they benefit it as you progress?

Response

Yes, the Animation Project has been completed, and the animated video is ready for launch (see https://w.wiki/F$99). We plan to release it in the first week of December to ensure maximum visibility and avoid overlap with other community activities. Community members participated in the production process, contributing to script development, cultural and linguistic review, and gaining practical experience in multimedia collaboration. The project strengthened understanding of how Wikimedia values and impact can be communicated through visual storytelling. The animation will continue to benefit the community through its use in outreach campaigns, social media engagement, and training sessions to attract new volunteers and increase public awareness of Wikimedia projects in Nigeria.

Questions

On the Wiki-In-School project, how do you plan to involve students and not just lecturers? How will you anticipate the sustainability of the project beyond the training period?

Response: The primary objective of the Wiki-in-School Program is to train lecturers who will, in turn, pass the knowledge to their students. This is a key criterion in selecting participating lecturers. They must demonstrate commitment to cascading the training to their students after the workshop.; To support this, and ensure direct student involvement, stipends are provided to the lecturers to organize follow-up training sessions and local Wiki events within their institutions for the students.

These are photo-evidence showing that this is already being done.

For sustainability beyond the initial training period, lecturers continue to mentor students, and the students are encouraged to establish Wiki Fan Clubs within their institutions. The clubs will serve as platforms for continuous learning, peer-to-peer support, and long-term engagement with the broader Wikimedia movement; this way, the impact of the program extends well beyond the training period or training lecturers.

Questions

The Committee is also seeking clarification on how you are planning to support your Fan Clubs and networks. Do you allocate them a stipulated amount to implement their independent fan club/network event?

Response

Previously, the only funding support available to fan clubs and networks was through the microgrant scheme. However, this approach was often limiting, as some requests were declined by the independent grant review committee, leaving several fan clubs unable to implement activities.

To bridge this gap, our current grant proposal includes a dedicated budget line to directly support fan clubs and networks outside of the regular microgrant structure. Through this allocation, each active fan club or network will receive stipends or activity-based funding to organize independent events, workshops, or outreach activities. This new model will ensure that no fan clubs or networks become inactive due to a lack of funding support. It will also ensure that they remain continuously engaged and that their activities are not disrupted by financial constraints.

Questions

The Committee is seeking clarification on the topic of photography. We understand that you have volunteers who are rich in these skills and could be ready to volunteer their time if they are properly recognized as the main paparazzi of the user group. Could you clarify why you cannot engage your internal skills (volunteers) instead of budgeting it, and why the cost is also really high?

Response: We do not have a dedicated “photography project” in which photographers are to be hired for pay but we included a budget of $150 under the Wiki-in-School program to cover photography. This amount is not a service payment but a stipend to support the local transportation of a volunteer photographer who will document the three-day event. The allocation of $50 per day covers transportation to and from the venue, which we consider reasonable for local travel.; While we have skilled volunteer photographers within our community, extended programs, such as the three-day (72-hour) Wiki-in-School training, require consistent professional coverage. Relying solely on volunteers for such long durations can create unpaid labour expectations, lead to burnout, and may risk delays or gaps in documentation, especially as some volunteers depend on photography for income. For projects involving external partners, we engage professional photographers to ensure reliability and accountability, while volunteers are prioritised for shorter activities and are reimbursed for local travel and out-of-pocket expenses.

Questions

Also, volunteers listed in your proposal have no direct username that can be used to reach them.

Response

This has now been fixed. Others like Tunde Oladimeji are not Wikimedians

Questions

The Committee would like to understand the rationale for the expenses on the Nigeria Distinguished Award. How do you carry these out, and how do you factor in all the expenses accrued? Do you organize online or in-person events?

The Nigeria Distinguished Award is an in-person recognition event organized to honour outstanding contributors within the Wikimedia community in Nigeria. The purpose of this event is to celebrate excellence, inspire others, and strengthen community engagement by acknowledging individuals and groups who have made significant contributions to Wikimedia projects and free knowledge dissemination in Nigeria.

The expenses captured in our budget reflect the basic logistical and welfare costs required to successfully host the event and accommodate awardees. Specifically:

Feeding and Accommodation: We planned for 15 awardees at a rate of $30 per person per day for 3 days, covering meals and lodging during the award event.
Award Plaques: Each awardee receives a customized plaque to commemorate their recognition, budgeted at $32 per plaque for 15 plaques.
Transport Stipends: A modest $10 per person is allocated to support awardees’ transport from their arrival point to the hotel.
Local Travels: Each awardee is also supported with $187.5 to cover local travel expenses associated with attending the event.

All these costs are factored in to reduce the financial burden on awardees, many of whom volunteer their time without compensation. Although, the above budget is at minimum as we plan to raise more funding for the event through our partners to cover the cost of a hall for the event, decorations and refreshment. The Nigeria Distinguished Award is implemented as an in-person event, as this format provides a more impactful platform for recognition, networking, and motivation of community members. However, highlights of the event are shared online to amplify visibility and celebrate the awardees publicly.

Questions

What specific key activities did you add in this proposal that you think your community members lacked in the previous years and would greatly impact community members?

Responses: We added the Nigerian Wikipedia Quality Improvement Program (QWIP) and the Wiki-Election program,

Feedbacks

Finally, the committee would like to encourage WIKIMEDIA NIGERIA to start thinking about building partnerships that will help support the technical and financial sustainability of the organization. Strategies will include how you should raise more funds and grants from outside the Foundation.

Responses: We appreciate you and the Committee’s helpful recommendation. Wikimedia User Group Nigeria recognizes the importance of building strategic partnerships to strengthen both our technical and financial sustainability. We are already thinking in this direction, and we are actively exploring collaborations with major academic institutions, corporate organizations, and development partners whose missions align with our mission. We will develop a fundraising strategy to diversify our funding sources, including seeking grants from non-Wikimedia foundations, corporate social responsibility programs, and local donors. We strongly believe that these efforts will strengthen our capacity to sustain impactful programs beyond Wikimedia Foundation funding.

Technical project review feedback

The technical project review team has reviewed the technical component in your application. You can find their feedback and questions below. Please add your reply to either the grants talk page or the grant application.

Feedback:

There are a few details about the technical implementation and the feasibility of achieving the project goals. The Pywikibot framework and mediawiki api parts are not of concern, but we are interested in knowing more about how you are going to infer metadata automatically. All we see is this one bullet point: Use natural language processing (NLP) to detect missing information or classify content based on file descriptions. This does not provide sufficient information on the tools that Wikimedia Nigeria will use, the problems they might run into or what the feasibility is, etc.
There are no concerns from SRE’s side. The bot work here is either Toolforge and/or does not bring any fresh concerns from the CDN side.

Questions to answer:

What is the long-term maintenance plan for the bot? Will this be maintained by Wikimedia Nigeria?
Please provide more details on the technical implementation of the bot’s core functionality, specifically how Wikimedia Nigeria will automatically infer metadata.

Please provide more details including any analysis / prototyping / testing you might have done to indicate that you might be able to meet your goals and metrics.

Responses

Thank you to the technical team for this valuable feedback. Initially, we had planned to develop tools such as bots to manage repetitive tasks; however, after further consideration, we discontinued this plan and did not allocate a budget for it. Instead, we decided to focus on building the technical capacity of our members and staff. We believe this approach will have a more sustainable and immediate impact, and enable our community to independently create, manage, and maintain tools in the future.

Public Policy Advocacy review feedback

We continue to appreciate Wikimedia Nigeria Foundation’s work on policy advocacy but are disappointed that this application does not reflect any of the feedback we provided in the last two rounds to a very similar application.

Disinformation work: As mentioned in our previous feedback, the topic of combating misinformation is important but does fall in the realm of public policy advocacy as the plans focus on general advocacy in the form of raising awareness amongst the general public. The partners they plan to work with also don’t involve government officials or policymakers. This work is still important, and their goal to target broadcasters could align well with the Wiki Loves Public Broadcasting campaign that WMDE and WM Europe are running, which the Dagbani group in the region has also joined.

National Language Policy: As mentioned multiple times, we do not support funding for policy advocacy related to linguistic initiatives. Language diversity is not urgent or posing existential consequences for our movement at the moment. In an effort to prioritize feasible impact within the limited time scope of this grant, we therefore recommend that the group focus on copyright reform which does represent a major opportunity to positively shape the regulatory ecosystem in which our projects exist.

We are interested in the Data Protection work and would consider this as a possibility for funding if a few points can be clarified. First, some feedback. Again, as we’ve mentioned in the past, the challenge with the Data Protection Act is that it has already been passed. There is therefore little opportunity to influence the shape of the legislation. The work to monitor and understand impacts, in order to understand how to influence it, needed to be done before it was passed.

Questions

In your last application you planned to “understand impacts” and do some general policy analysis of this bill. What did you find? How will you build on the results?

Responses We conducted a preliminary review to understand how the Nigeria Data Protection Act (NDPA) may impact Wikidata. Our findings show that the Act aligns with the GDPR framework, especially Article 6(1)(e) and 6(1)(f), which correspond to Section 25(1)(b)(iv) and (v) of the NDPA. These provisions of the NDPA recognise “performance of a task carried out in the public interest” and “legitimate interests” as lawful bases for data processing, both of which are consistent with Wikidata’s global legal rationale for hosting verifiable public-interest information. Building on these findings, and based on your recommendation, our next plans will now shift from attempting to influence the Copyright Act (which is no longer possible since it has already been passed) to focusing on implementation and community preparedness. We plan to:

Develop guidance for Nigerian Wikidata contributors to help them understand what constitutes lawful processing under the NDPA, especially regarding biographies of living persons.
Conduct community sensitisation sessions on responsible data contributions, focusing on avoiding unlawful publication of non-public personal data.

Questions

You mention that you will establish a committee of experts. As we understand it, you already announced the formation of a public policy advocacy team in 2024. What has this group achieved to date? Why do you need to establish a new group?

Responses

Yes, we established the Public Policy advocacy team in 2024 as a wikimedian approach to public advocacy and to engage our ecosystem on policy matters that affect open knowledge in Nigeria.

The group hosted the inaugural Public Domain Day in January 2024, bringing together international experts on public domain and Creative Commons licensing to discuss the relevance and impact of open cultural access within the Nigerian context. Building on this, the group has been engaging with communities in countries that face similar Freedom of Panorama (FOP) restrictions, including colleagues in Ghana and South Africa, to learn how they navigate legal barriers and sustain Wikimedia-related photographic and documentation activities. Representatives also participated in the International Copyright Conference in South Africa, hosted by ReCreate Africa, where broader continental strategies for copyright reform and public interest advocacy were shared and discussed.
In addition, the group has initiated a formal dialogue with the Nigerian Copyright Commission to establish Wikimedia Nigeria as a recognised stakeholder in ongoing and future copyright policy discussions. The Commission has expressed willingness to consider Wikimedia Nigeria in consultations concerning upcoming reforms.
The group is also examining the National Language Policy to understand why it has not effectively fostered the adoption and use of indigenous languages in educational and public contexts. This research aims to highlight how the absence of robust language integration policies directly affects the growth of Nigerian-language Wikipedia projects, notably by limiting contributor participation, reducing content quality, and slowing the development of sustainable local-language communities.

We do not want to establish a new group per se but an ad-hoc committee from the Public Policy Advocacy Group would be established.

Questions

You mention that, “Where necessary, we will advocate for appropriate changes to mitigate any negative effects of the law on our activities” - what are those changes? How will you advocate for them?

Response: The main change relates to the lack of a Freedom of Panorama (FOP) exemption in the Nigerian Copyright Act. The absence of FOP restricts the ability of Wikimedia contributors to freely contribute images of public buildings, sculptures, and other artworks permanently located in public spaces. We are already engaging the Nigerian Copyright Commission (NCC) with a clear advocacy goal: to include a Freedom of Panorama exemption in the Act. The Chairman of the Commission has assured us that we will be involved in all relevant consultations, stakeholder meetings, and policy discussions that affect our areas of interest.

Our advocacy strategy includes: (1) continued direct engagement with the management of the NCC; (2) participation in public consultations and technical working groups; (3) evidence-based policy briefs demonstrating how FOP supports the public interest, digital creativity, and Nigeria’s cultural visibility online; and (4) collaboration with civil society, mission-aligned organizations, creative industry stakeholders, and open knowledge advocates. Through this structured engagement, we aim to ensure that future amendments to the Copyright Act address the current limitations and better support open knowledge projects such as Wikimedia.

Thank you very much, and please feel free to share your feedback in this discussion page by Sunday, November 9, 2025 at 12 PM UTC.

Wishing you the best of luck.

On behalf of the WMF Community Resources team and the SSA Regional Funding Committee WBuloso-WMF (talk) 19:27, 31 October 2025 (UTC)Reply

Thank you for your continued support. Wikimedia Nigeria (talk) 21:51, 9 November 2025 (UTC)Reply

Hello @Wikimedia Nigeria, this is to confirm that based on your response, the technology project has been withdrawn and disabled from your grant application. Best regards, DSaroyan (WMF) (talk) 16:44, 11 November 2025 (UTC)Reply