Open Foundation West Africa: Opening the Door to African Knowledge

 

Open Foundation West Africa: Opening the Door to African Knowledge

I recently came across Open Foundation West Africa (OFWA), and I became curious about what the organization actually does.

The more I learned, the more familiar some of its work felt.

It touches many of the same questions that have been occupying my mind for years:

Who creates knowledge? Who gets represented? Who preserves African history and culture? And how can communities make their own knowledge available to the world?

Open Foundation West Africa is based in Ghana and works in the field of open knowledge, education, digital skills, culture and technology. It began its work in 2016 and has developed projects connected with Wikimedia, Creative Commons, open education and digital preservation. Open Foundation West Africa

What does “open” mean?

When I hear the word open, I think about access.

Can a student find the information?

Can a teacher use it?

Can a researcher build upon it?

Can a community tell its own story?

Can someone in another country learn from it?

That is one of the ideas behind the open-knowledge movement.

Instead of knowledge being locked away behind expensive subscriptions, private databases or institutions that only a few people can access, open knowledge attempts to make information available for people to use, learn from and build upon.

For Africa, this has enormous importance.

Africa has never lacked knowledge

Sometimes discussions about the digital divide make it sound as though Africa needs to be given knowledge.

I see it differently.

Africa has always had knowledge.

There is knowledge in farming communities.

There is knowledge among women who preserve seeds and food.

There is knowledge among people who understand rivers, wetlands, forests, mangroves and the movement of animals.

There is knowledge in oral history.

There is knowledge in languages that may never have been adequately documented.

There is knowledge in traditional architecture, music, medicine, food systems and relationships with the land.

The challenge is often documentation, preservation, access and representation.

That is where organizations working in open knowledge become important.

The Wikimedia connection

OFWA is particularly interesting to me because of its relationship with the Wikimedia movement.

Wikimedia is much bigger than Wikipedia.

There is Wikipedia, where people create and improve encyclopedia articles.

There is Wikimedia Commons, where photographs, videos, audio recordings and other freely licensed media can be preserved.

There is Wikidata, which organizes structured information that can be used by people, researchers and computers.

There are also projects designed to make educational knowledge available even when people do not have continuous Internet access.

OFWA has worked across these different parts of the open-knowledge ecosystem.

That means its work isn't simply about writing Wikipedia articles.

It is about helping Africans participate in creating the digital record of Africa.

The Africa Wiki Challenge

One of OFWA's projects that particularly caught my attention is the Africa Wiki Challenge.

The project encourages people to improve African representation across Wikimedia projects.

The 2026 challenge focused on “Water for Life in Africa,” encouraging contributions related to Africa's water resources, wetlands, sanitation, climate and communities. The campaign included Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wikidata and Wikivoyage.

This is important because the subjects being documented aren't abstract.

They are connected to people's lives.

Water affects farmers.

It affects cities.

It affects wildlife.

It affects women who collect and manage water.

It affects food production.

It affects ecosystems.

It affects the future of communities.

Documenting those subjects is therefore also documenting African life.

From field experience to public knowledge

This is where I began seeing a connection with my own work.

I have been spending time thinking about environmental knowledge in Senegal.

I have encountered people working with agriculture, nature reserves, coastal ecosystems and the Sahel.

I've become particularly interested in traditional ecological knowledge—knowledge that may exist in communities long before someone writes a scientific paper about it.

What happens if we bring different kinds of knowledge together?

A farmer's experience.

A woman's knowledge of a landscape.

A scientist's research.

A photograph.

A video.

An oral history.

A book.

A Wikipedia article.

A Wikidata record.

Suddenly these things can become pieces of a larger knowledge system.

This is where BioAfricain comes in

My idea for BioAfricain grew from this way of thinking.

I want to explore how environmental knowledge encountered in Africa can become part of the free public knowledge system.

That doesn't mean taking knowledge away from communities.

It means finding ways to document it responsibly, identify its sources, credit the people who contributed it and make appropriate portions of it accessible to others.

The goal is not simply:

Africa produces information for the Internet.

The goal is:

African people participate in deciding what knowledge enters the digital world and how it is represented.

That is a very different idea.

Knowledge for people who are offline

Another OFWA project that interests me is Kiwix4Schools.

Kiwix makes it possible to access educational material without a continuous Internet connection. OFWA has used this approach in its educational work. Open Foundation West Africa projects

This connects with my own interest in Internet-in-a-Box.

We sometimes talk about the digital divide as if the solution is simply getting everybody online.

But what if we also ask:

What knowledge should be available when people are offline?

A school, village, nature reserve or community organization could have a local collection of educational material without having to maintain a constant Internet connection.

That changes the meaning of access.

Wikipedia and the age of artificial intelligence

There is another reason this work feels increasingly important to me.

We are now living in a world of ChatGPT, Gemini, Copilot and other artificial-intelligence systems.

People ask these systems questions about Africa every day.

But where does the information come from?

What happens when an AI system knows a great deal about European history but very little about a particular African community?

What happens when a village, environmental practice, historical event or African scientist has little or no representation in the digital knowledge systems that AI uses?

The problem doesn't begin with artificial intelligence.

It begins much earlier—with what we document and preserve.

That is why I have become more interested in Wikipedia and Wikimedia projects.

They are not simply places where people look up information.

They are part of the infrastructure of the emerging information age.

Slow knowledge in a fast world

I've also become interested in what I call slow Wikipedia.

Artificial intelligence can produce an article in seconds.

But knowledge sometimes requires something else.

It requires finding the book.

Reading the book.

Checking the source.

Talking to someone who remembers.

Looking at an old photograph.

Going to the place.

Listening to an elder.

Finding the original document.

Then adding that information carefully.

That takes time.

I don't see that as a weakness.

I see it as a different kind of learning.

AI can help us move quickly. People still have to decide what is worth knowing.

A possible connection with Senegal

This is why I am interested in learning more about Open Foundation West Africa.

I can imagine a project that begins with something very concrete in Senegal.

For example:

environmental knowledge + women farmers + nature reserves + photographs + oral histories + scientific research + Wikimedia.

A project could document a particular ecological area.

The photographs could go to Wikimedia Commons.

Important people, places, organizations and events could be added to Wikidata.

Existing Wikipedia articles could be improved with reliable references.

Educational materials could be assembled for students.

Offline resources could eventually make some of that information available in places with limited connectivity.

The pieces begin connecting.

From local knowledge to global knowledge

What I find most exciting about this possibility is the direction of the knowledge.

It begins locally.

A person knows something.

A community knows something.

A landscape holds a history.

Someone documents it.

Someone verifies it.

Someone photographs it.

Someone writes about it.

Then it becomes accessible to people far beyond that original community.

A child in New York might learn about a Senegalese ecosystem.

A student in Dakar might learn about another African community.

A researcher might discover a photograph that would otherwise have remained in someone's personal collection.

An AI system might eventually encounter information that previously wasn't available to it.

The knowledge begins in one place but can travel.

Why organizations like OFWA matter

For me, the significance of Open Foundation West Africa is not simply that it is another organization working with Wikipedia.

It represents an idea that I have become increasingly interested in:

Africans should be active creators of the digital knowledge commons about Africa.

Not merely subjects.

Not merely people being photographed.

Not merely people whose history is interpreted by somebody else.

Creators. Documenters. Editors. Archivists. Photographers. Researchers. Teachers. Storytellers.

That is the part of the open-knowledge movement that interests me.

And it makes me wonder what might happen if environmental organizations, farmers, women-led community groups, African historians, Wikimedia volunteers and young people began working together.

Perhaps the next stage of African knowledge isn't simply about putting Africa on the Internet.

Perhaps it is about helping Africa shape the knowledge that the world finds there.