WikiChallenge Ecoles d'Afrique/Results and best practices 2025

Introduction

WikiChallenge Écoles d’Afrique is a collaborative writing competition for pupils aged approximately 8–13, designed to introduce young learners across Africa to digital skills, collaborative contribution, and open knowledge creation. The competition has taken place annually since 2017 and invites students to write richly illustrated Vikidia articles about their local environment, community, geography, culture or heritage.

The 2024–2025 edition (8th edition) confirms the programme’s growth, both geographically and linguistically, and strengthens collaboration between schools, local Wikimedia communities and Orange Foundation teams. This 2024–2025 edition also marked a significant year of expansion, good participation, and international recognition, as the project was honored with the Open Pedagogy Award 2024 by OE Global.

This page presents the results, impact, and best practices from the 2024–2025 edition.

Links

French main page of the competition
English main page of the competition
Meta page dedicated to the full programme
Facebook page of the competition
Images on Wikimedia Commons related to this edition
Playlist Youtube
Rapport de jury 2024-2025 (403 pages document for the jury... in French)

Tags

Education, Offline, WikiFundi, Vikidia, Writing competition, Francophonie, Africa

Impact and key figures 2024–2025

The 2025 edition saw a substantial increase in engagement across the continent:

13 countries participated (including Botswana, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, DR Congo, Guinea, Liberia, Madagascar, Mali, Morocco, Senegal, Sierra Leone, Tunisia)
422 schools registered
174 student articles were published on Vikidia
696 Photos et 40 vidéos were produced and uploaded
38 schools received awards at international, national or special prize level

This confirms WikiChallenge Écoles d’Afrique as one of the largest structured youth contribution programmes in the Wikimedia ecosystem in Africa.

Winners and recognition

International prizes

The international jury selected three articles that demonstrated exceptional research, writing quality, and use of media:

Mali – Danses du terroir à Banimonotié — École Almamy Timbo de Bougouni
Morocco – Gare ferroviaire de Fnideq — École Ibn Bajade Fnideq
Botswana – otshelo — Magopane Primary School

Coup de cœur (Jury’s special prize)

Senegal – Tambour de communication — École Ndiébel Publique de Kaolack

National prizes

34 prizes were awarded.

Highlights

Cameroon: Vin de raphia (School Bana)
Burkina-Faso: Musée de l’eau du Burkina Faso de l'école Balkuy C;
Guinea: Préparation artisanale du sel (School Kipé 2) and Padhè gouri (School du Centre) ;
Tunisia: Safsaf, de l’École primaire Sité Nouvelle ;
Liberia: Du-port Road Waterside (JESCOR Learning Center).

All articles are listed here : https://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Projet:WikiChallenge_Écoles_d%27Afrique_2025/Bilan

Presentation of the writing competition

The WikiChallenge engages schools from the Orange Foundation’s Digital Schools network, integrating the use of:

WikiFundi (offline wiki editing platform),
Vikidia (encyclopedia for children),
Wikimedia Commons (for photos and videos).

Each school is accompanied by a digital facilitator and teachers, and sometimes by local Wikimedians, who mentor students in:

research and documentation,
collaborative writing,
image and video production,
publication under free licenses.

Students choose topics linked to their local environment and cultural context, helping document African heritage and daily life from a youth perspective. Many articles are illustrated with original photos and videos made by pupils.

Highlights of the 2024–2025 edition

Several elements marked this 8th edition:

Bilingual expansion: the contest was organised in both French and English, increasing participation in Anglophone countries.
Stronger local collaboration: Wikimedia groups and local Orange teams were more involved in training and follow-up. The central coordination received for the first time a little budget to use on seed-training by Wikimedians, thus lowering the barrier of collaboration between Orange and Wikimedia. Some of the people involved are: user:IdealCom, User:Lexy Tchuileu, User:Falilou224, User:Lingabo, User:Shoodho, User:Fawaz.tairou, or User:Aimeabibis (and more)
Reinforced central coordination: until 2025, User:Anthere coordinated the programme, with support from User:Afek91 for Communication and Documentation for the jury. In 2025, User:Dadrik joined the team to provide additional support. This permitted to increase the extent of training sessions and office hours to support the local Orange team in the implementation of the contest in their schools.

People and structures involved

The programme relies on a multi-stakeholder partnership:

Wiki in Africa – programme coordination, training, support, jury, and communication
Orange Foundation and local Orange teams – funding, logistics, facilitation, and communication
Vikidia Association – platform and editorial support
Local Wikimedia communities and volunteers – training, mentoring
Teachers and digital facilitators – daily support in schools

The full list of all partner organisations, Wikimedians and vikidians involved, and volunteer jury members may be found here : https://fr.vikidia.org/wiki/Projet:WikiChallenge_Écoles_d%27Afrique/Equipe_2025

This complex ecosystem is essential for the success and sustainability of the project.

Challenges and lessons learned

Several lessons emerged from the 2024–2025 edition:

Language support is crucial: bilingual expansion requires adapted training materials and editorial support.
Training remains central: especially on writing quality, sourcing, and free licenses.
Local coordination is key: the most successful countries are those with strong collaboration between schools, Orange teams and Wikimedians.
Teacher Workload: Coordinating the writing process alongside a dense school curriculum remains a challenge. Best results were seen in schools where the project was spread over several weeks rather than a single intensive session. Accordingly, challenges were higher when the programme was slow to start
Multimedia Quality: While the number of photos is high, there is a continued need for training on "encyclopedic photography" (clearer subjects, better lighting, and copyright awareness)
Local partnerships sometimes slow to build. In some countries, in spite of the efforts, the staff of local Orange Foundation did not engage with local wikipedians they were put in relationship to. Timeframe issues mostly. We shall try again at next edition...
First AI-generated articles spotted... this was to be expected... topic to be reinforced in the training sessions next year
Increased upload of copyvios (a sign the students are increasingly online...) and an official request for pictures take-down for copyright violation (images promptly deleted).

Highlight on communication and outreach

This year, let’s deep dive a bit more into the specific challenges and lessons related to Communication and Social media. The communication strategy had to bridge a significant gap between remote, offline rural schools and a global digital audience.

Challenges

The "Invisible" Participant: Because most schools work offline, there is a "blackout period" between the launch and the final submission. It is difficult to generate "live" social media buzz when the students’ daily progress isn't connected to the internet. We follow a strategy with the implementation of different successive campaigns.
The "Unreachable" participant. For similar reasons, it is difficult for us to engage with the students of several of the countries. Whilst many of the students are online in Morroco or Tunisia, they are « off the grid » in other countries such as Mali. Nevertheless, this year, we created and published a collection of short videos providing tips to the students.
"Consent and Privacy Complexity": Sharing photos of students on social media platforms (Facebook, X, Instagram) requires strict adherence to child protection and image rights across 13 different legal jurisdictions. This often delays or prevents the posting of "behind-the-scenes" content. We usually rely on pictures collected by the Wikimedians or provided by the Orange local teams. This is patchy...
"Language Echo Chambers": Social media engagement often remains split. French-language posts perform exceptionally well in West Africa and Tunisia, but cross-pollination with the newer English-speaking participants (Botswana, Liberia, Sierra Leone) remains a hurdle for a unified "Pan-African" digital conversation. This is at best awkward to publish in two languages on one Facebook channel... For all reports, or diff articles, we try to provide translations.
"Communication strategy calendar collision": the programme being a partnership with Orange, a lot of the communication is provided by Orange Group. We have no hand on it, and no hand on the communication calendar. This year, for unknown reasons, the Orange communication team preferred to announce winners publicly end of September instead of May/June as done previous year. This created quite a bit of confusion as Wiki in Africa could not run its announcement campaign as initially planned, and some of the local Orange Foundation decided... to announce locally anyway...

Lessons Learned (What worked in 2025)

WhatsApp as the "Middle-Ware": We realized that while Facebook is our public face, WhatsApp groups are our real communication engine. Using WhatsApp to collect "raw" photos and anecdotes from teachers allowed the central team to curate and post to social media on their behalf.
Whilst WhatsApp facilitate the communication between members of the team, we observed that over the years, the group grew, often to include « managers », leading to a decrease of conversation within the facilitators involved in the implementation. The conversations shifted to private canals or take place during Office Hours.
The Power of Local Influencers/Wikimedians or of Local Orange Organizations: In countries where local Wikimedia User Groups took over the communication, the reach was significantly higher. Localized tagging of Ministry of Education accounts and local Orange affiliates created a "pincer effect" that increased the project's credibility.
"Small Content" is King: We learned that short, 15-second "Did you know?" clips performed better than long-form project summaries. This "snackable" content is better suited.
Key Takeaway for 2026: To grow our digital footprint, we should move toward a "Social-Media-First" reporting style for local facilitators—encouraging them to capture 30 seconds of video as part of their standard reporting duties.

Conclusion

The year 2025 was marked by the success of our social media initiatives for the “WikiChallenges African Schools” contest. The planned campaigns proved their effectiveness by strengthening the visibility and engagement of our community. However, this positive assessment does not prevent us from recognizing areas for improvement. To maximize our impact, it is essential to give space to authentic testimonials, which are a powerful source of emotional connection. At the same time, strengthening our collaboration with partners on social media should be at the heart of our next steps, in order to broaden our reach and consolidate our digital presence.

Next steps and perspectives

For the next edition, the programme aims to:

Strengthen facilitator and teacher training
Improve article quality and sourcing standards, and provide advise related to the use of AI tools...
Increase (or at least maintain) participation in French and English-speaking countries
Pilot participation in Arabic-speaking countries
Develop more local partnerships with Wikimedia communities
Encourage reuse of content produced by pupils on other Wikimedia projects

The long-term ambition remains to make WikiChallenge Écoles d’Afrique a major gateway for African youth into open knowledge. By empowering children to become "knowledge creators" rather than just consumers, the project continues to reduce the "digital gap" and enrich the internet with authentic African voices.