Months of African Cinema Campaign in Kenya/Events & Projects 2021
The Months of African Cinema Campaign is a global campaign that aims to enhance content on Africa's TV, Film and Arts on Wikipedia.
The campaign has been well received in Kenya especially considering that the Arts and creative sector is dominated by youth, who make up a big percentage (85%) of members of the planning Wikimedia Community User Group Kenya.
User:Ms Kabintie has organized the Afrocine edit-a-thon in Kenya from 2020 and the campaign has proven to be a key project in mobilizing community members for the usergroup and generally in increasing advocacy about Wikipedia in Kenya, especially among young people who comprise 85 per cent of the country's population.
As a result we've had a high retention of editors, who are eager to plug in the movement and share their skills and knowledge.
Achievements edit
Increased content on Kenya's Actors, films and film Festivals on English Wikipedia
Gender Gap 80 per cent of participants in our campaign are female, which has seen us write more about women in our creative industry. In the 2021 Afrocine edit-a-thon, 90 percent of the Articles we created or improved were for female creatives. This efforts are going along way in helping shrink the gender gap on wikipedia both within the editors and in the content, considering that based on recent stats, only 15 per cent of editors on English Wikipedia are female and that women only have a 19 per cent coverage on wikipedia.
Recognition from the Kenya Film Commission User:Ms Kabintie had an opportunity to present the campaign to the CEO of the Kenya Film Commission this year, and also discussed areas of collaboration in future campaigns.
The commission is the state agency tasked with the promotion and development of the TV and Film industry and having it's goodwill will go along way in consolidating our efforts as editors as well as validating our efforts.
The Kenyan Film Commission's Relationship Manager graced our opening ceremony and got an oportunity to interact with the ditors as well as learn more about the Months of African Cinema Campaign.
Australian High Commissioner to Kenya invitation to an evemt in November dubbed Women Creatives; Road to success.
More Community Members the campaign has helped draw editors who had been fragmented together to joing the planning wikimedia community user group in Kenya, and this will help us fast track the process.
This synergy has also helped us to collectively participate in other Wikiprojects and events within the movement such as Movement Strategy, Wikimania, Wiki Indaba. This has helped to make the new generation of Kenyan wikimedia Community visible in Wikipshere.
Future Plans edit
Host 2022 Afrocine Edit-a-thon in Kenya outside Nairobi to tap participants in other regions for diversity in line with the movement strategy and the country's development agenda. Kenya has 47 counties and when projects are only centered in Nairobi, it leaves other young people in other regions marginalised.
We have two proposed regions; Mombasa and Eldoret counties; 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 universities 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. This can be done through collaboration in the [[1]]project.
Moving the Afrocine campaign outside Nairobi in the next 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; Cinema Mashinani.
Host a Capacity Building workshop for local organisers in 2022. The workshop will also be a good opportunity to engage journalists.
Language Diversity edit
Afrocine edit-a-thon in Kenya 2022 to incorporate Swahili as one of the languages after English.