Grants:Project/Rapid/Afrocine 2021 Edit-a-thon in Kenya/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2020-21 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/Afrocine 2021 Edit-a-thon in Kenya.
You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
You are welcome to Email rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Goals

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went? Yes

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets. Please be sure to review and provide metrics required for Rapid Grants.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
Atleast 30 Created/improved articles	134 Articles Improved, 12 new pages created	We created a warm and friendly environment for the participants that encouraged a sense of ownership in the project, team work and competitiveness. We also had a social media campaign in this edition that provided realtime stats of our achievements in each editing session and this was a motivating factor to the particpants. Our virtual edit-a-thon hours, which ran for 2 days, twice a week, divided in three sessions; Morning, Afternoon and Night, also created flexibility for the participants and regrouping that saw particpants of each group want to outdo what the ones in prev session had done.
Total No of participants (15, new (10)	No of particpants (19), new (5)	We had a good number of returning editors so we limited new editors slot to 5. we also had a group of 5 librarians involved in the 1lib1ref campaign join our project and their editing experience was a big boost.

Learning

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

What worked well? Having a project plan way ahead of time. I knew excatly what i needed to do different in the 2021 edition to scale the gains of the 2020 edit-a-thon. Reaching out to the Kenya Film Commission to show support by gracing our opening ceremony was also a great motivating factor to the editors.

The opening ceremony as envinsioned provided a platfrom for all particiapnts to get to know each other and learn more about the project as well invite journalists to cover our campaign. we got published in two newspaper articles in a national newspaper.

What did not work so well? Not having a closing ceremony. This complicated the aspect of handing over prizes to the top 10 editors and i'm still stuck with some of them, waiting for participants to communicate how best to collect their gifts. I ltook advantage of a wikimania meet up to hand over some of the gifts.

We also had to push dates for our original project start period due to delay in grant application, review and approval.

What would you do differently next time?

Apply for funds earlier
ensure we have an opening and closing ceremony
Consider hosting the event in a neighbouring county outside Nairobi to tap participants in other regions for diversity. Kenya has 47 counties and when projects are only centered in Nairobi, it leaves other young people in other regions marginalised.

I have 2 proposed regions; Mombasa or Eldoret; There is a librarian who participated in the 2021 edit-a-thon that offered to mobilize participants in her county (Eldoret). She works at one of leading universitities in the region and this would be a good platform.

Mombasa County on the other hand has a good number of native swahili speakers, who would also help increase the language diversity by contributing more artciles in Swahili Wikipedia.

Moving the Afrocine campaign outside Nairobi in the neext edition will also be in line with Kenya's Film Development Agenda that seeks to grow the industry at the grassroot level in a campiagn dubbed; #CinemaMashinani and will also be aligned with the movement's strategy on Diversity.

Finances

Grant funds spent

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on. All grant money was spend on the project to cover the following expenses;

Food Ksh 45,000
Venue Ksh20,000
Transport Ksh 28,500
Data Ksh 20,000
Projector Ksh8,000
Banner Ksh10,000
Prizes for top contributors in the edit-a-thon (Branded Travel Mugs) Ksh15,000
Camera Hire Ksh 10 ,000
Social Media Campaign for publicity Ksh 20,000
Framed Certificates 8,500

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

Remaining funds have been used or will be used for other approved mission-aligned activities. This use has been requested in writing and approved by WMF.

No. We had Ksh 8,500 from hotel discount that reduced our venue charges which we used to cater for framed certifactes to the new editors. I felt it would be good to carry on with the 2020 practice to ensure that any new editors participating in the campaign will always have a certificate of appreciation to create equality. I also learned that participants really appreciate the certificates.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project? Thanks to outsatnding efforts to shrink gender gaps on female creatives, i was invited alongside one participant to an event orgainised by Australian Commissioner to Kenya on Women Creatives;Road to Sucess. You can read a more detailed report about the 2021 afrocine-editathon in Kenya HERE Months of African Cinema Campaign in Kenya/Events & Projects 2021.