Every movement begins somewhere. Sometimes, it begins with an idea. Sometimes, with a small group of people asking a question that others have not yet thought to ask. For Open Foundation West Africa, it began with a belief that Africa should have a stronger voice in the knowledge being created and shared with the world.

Ten years ago, the digital world was already becoming one of the most important places where people learned, searched, discovered and formed their understanding of society. Yet behind the promise of a world connected by information was a quieter reality: many African stories were missing, many communities lacked the tools to participate, many students could not reliably access online knowledge, and many people who had the potential to contribute simply did not have a pathway into the movement.

OFWA began working within that gap.

Ten years can change an organisation. Ten years can also change a community, a generation of contributors, and the way a continent is represented in the knowledge people find online. For Open Foundation West Africa (OFWA), the past decade has been a journey of turning a simple conviction into a growing ecosystem: Africans should not only consume knowledge online; they should have the skills, platforms and opportunities to create, document and shape it.

From classrooms and university campuses to technical communities and digital campaigns, OFWA has spent the last ten years building pathways for people to participate in the creation of knowledge and to see Africa more accurately represented in the digital world. In creating communities through shared knowledge, every movement needs people before it can have programmes and communities before it can have a lasting impact.

Over the past decade, OFWA has steadily built a network reaching approximately 3,500+ contributors and participants through sub-hubs, campus communities and clubs, with about 12 campus clubs established across Ghana. These spaces have become entry points into the Wikimedia and open knowledge movement, bringing together students, educators, professionals and newcomers who learn, contribute and grow together.

More importantly, participants have increasingly moved from simply attending activities to becoming trainers, organisers, mentors, technical contributors and community leaders. The communities themselves have therefore become part of OFWA’s most enduring legacy: a growing network of people with the confidence and capacity to keep building.

Programs that turned the vision into meaningful impact

OFWA’s programmes and projects have evolved around a central belief: access to knowledge is only the beginning. Over the past decade, the organisation has developed initiatives that connect people to information, equip them with the tools to contribute, and create pathways for participation, community ownership and leadership.

This journey can be seen in the development of Kiwix4Schools, which emerged in response to the realities faced by students and schools where reliable internet access remains a challenge.

For many students, the question is not whether knowledge exists online, but whether they can actually reach it. Kiwix4Schools responded by bringing offline access to educational knowledge directly into schools. Tested initially in three underserved areas, the programme was subsequently deployed in 17 schools, with approximately 1,265 students trained during its early implementation. In the 2021–2022 phase alone, the project reached 22 schools across seven regions, trained 777 students, of whom 49.8% were female, and installed Kiwix on 395 devices.

The intervention revealed an important gap: although 75.5% of participating students had used the internet before and 52% had heard of Wikipedia, only about 2% had heard of Kiwix. The programme later extended beyond Ghana, with 65 Kiwix ambassadors certified from 100 enrolled mentors across 20 countries in 2023. Kiwix4Schools demonstrated that digital inclusion is not simply about being connected; it is about ensuring that people can access useful knowledge when connectivity is limited.

The same commitment to expanding participation shaped Shine Her Light, which responds to another dimension of the knowledge gap: who is represented in the digital record. Launched in 2024, the campaign addresses the underrepresentation of African women in digital knowledge by equipping contributors to research, document and publish the stories and achievements of African women. Its inaugural edition produced more than 200 new articles and edits focused on African women, while its wider programme activity has recorded significant contributions across programmes, editors, words, references, articles and media.

Beyond these numbers, Shine Her Light represents a deliberate effort to make African women more visible in the digital record and enable communities to participate in closing the gender knowledge gap.

As participation grows, so does the need for communities to shape how Africa is represented in the global knowledge ecosystem. This is reflected in the Africa Wiki Challenge (AWC), initiated in 2021 to address the incomplete, fragmented and sometimes missing representation of Africa on Wikipedia.

What began as an effort to strengthen African content has grown into a collaborative movement spanning more than 30 countries, contributing more than 206,530 new articles and nearly 101,000 edits. Through the years, the challenge has created opportunities for Africans and members of the global Wikimedia community to document the continent’s people, places, histories, cultures, institutions and contemporary realities.

Each contribution adds another piece to a larger digital record, helping to ensure that Africa is not simply described by others, but increasingly documented by people who understand and live its stories.

Together, these programmes illustrate the broader evolution of OFWA’s work. The organisation has never been only about creating content; it has been about creating capacity. A student introduced to offline educational resources can become a knowledge contributor. A newcomer to Wikipedia can become an organiser. A community member can learn to document local history. A participant can eventually become a trainer, mentor or leader.

Across its programmes and projects, OFWA has built a pathway from access to participation, from participation to contribution, and from contribution to leadership. In doing so, it continues to build communities in which people are not simply recipients of knowledge, but active participants in creating, preserving and shaping the knowledge of their communities and continent.

THE NEXT DECADE: Scaling and sustaining the impact

Ten years on, OFWA’s story is therefore larger than a collection of programmes, campaigns and statistics. It is the story of people, communities and ideas coming together to change how knowledge is created, accessed and represented.

It is visible in students who gained access to educational resources without depending entirely on the internet, women whose stories entered global knowledge platforms, developers who found pathways into Wikimedia technology, and communities that learned to document their own histories.

The first decade established the foundation. The next decade presents an opportunity to strengthen that foundation—expanding communities, deepening technical capacity, widening access to knowledge and ensuring that more African voices shape the knowledge the world shares.

After ten years of building, OFWA is entering its next chapter with a simple ambition: not just to participate in Africa’s open knowledge future, but to help build it.