The Wikimedia Pan-African Hub: Connecting African Wikimedians Across the Continent

 The Pan-African Hub is relatively new and its contact information has changed as the organization has developed. As of September 2026, the Wikimedia Pan-African Hub / Sub-Saharan Africa Hub (SSA Hub) is in its pilot phase and has an interim steering structure. �

The Wikimedia Pan-African Hub: Connecting African Wikimedians Across the Continent

Building an African network for African knowledge

For many years, Wikimedia communities across Africa have been working in different countries, languages, and regions to expand the presence of African knowledge on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.

Now there is an effort to bring many of these communities into a stronger continental network: the Wikimedia Pan-African Hub, also known as the Sub-Saharan Africa Hub (SSA Hub).

The Pan-African Hub is designed to strengthen collaboration, leadership, capacity building, and knowledge equity among Wikimedia affiliates and communities across Sub-Saharan Africa.

The Hub is currently operating as a pilot and is developing its governance structure, programs, and services. Its current Meta-Wiki page was updated in September 2026.

What is the Pan-African Hub?

The Pan-African Hub is not intended to replace the individual Wikimedia groups working in African countries.

Instead, it provides a place where those communities can connect with one another, share experiences, develop projects, learn from each other, and work together on issues that cross national boundaries.

The Hub describes itself as a platform for affiliates across Sub-Saharan Africa to share experiences and ideas and find opportunities for collaboration. It also provides a way for African Wikimedia communities to communicate more effectively with the wider Wikimedia movement.

This is important because Africa is not a single linguistic or cultural community. Wikimedia contributors work in English, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, Wolof, and many other African languages.

A continental network can help these communities learn from one another without losing their local identities.

Who is participating?

The Pan-African Hub already includes a growing network of Wikimedia affiliates, user groups, and organizations.

Among the organizations listed on the Hub's current Meta-Wiki page are:

Open Foundation West Africa

Wikimedians of Cameroon User Group

Wikimedia Community User Group Sénégal

Wikimedia Community User Group Botswana

Wikimedia Community User Group Namibia

Igbo Wikimedians User Group

Gungbe Wikimedians User Group

Wikimedia Community of Togo User Group

Wikimedia Community User Group Madagascar

Wikimedia Community User Group South Sudan

Wikimedia Community User Group Burundi

Wikimedia Community User Group Niger

Open Knowledge Arusha

Wikimedia Community Zanzibar

Igala Wikimedia Community

Wiki Photo Africa

Wiki In Africa

Global Open Initiative

Wiki Health Africa

Afroyanga Cultural Enlightenment Initiative

Wikimedians of Republic of Congo User Group

The list is larger than these examples and continues to develop as the Hub's pilot expands.

What does the Hub hope to accomplish?

The Pan-African Hub has identified several important areas of work.

1. Leadership development

One goal is to strengthen the leadership capacity of African Wikimedia communities.

This includes training, mentorship, and opportunities for emerging organizers and community leaders to develop their skills.

2. Capacity building

African Wikimedia communities have different levels of access to technology, funding, organizational experience, and training.

The Hub can provide a mechanism for communities to exchange knowledge and build capacity together.

3. Collaboration

A community in Senegal may be working on a project that could be useful to Wikimedians in Kenya.

A photographer in Ghana may have knowledge that could help a Wiki Loves Africa project elsewhere.

A language community in Nigeria may have developed tools or methods that could be adapted by another African-language community.

The Hub creates a continental space for these connections.

4. African knowledge and languages

One of the larger questions facing Wikimedia is how to make sure that African knowledge is represented not simply through information about Africa, but also through knowledge created and documented by African communities themselves.

The Pan-African Hub's framework identifies African content, languages, and values as important areas of work.

5. A stronger African voice within Wikimedia

The proposed framework also envisions the Hub as a mechanism for representing African Wikimedia communities in broader Wikimedia governance and decision-making spaces.

This is significant because Wikimedia is a global movement, while the needs of African communities can be quite different from those of communities in Europe or North America.

The Hub is part of a larger African Wikimedia ecosystem

The Pan-African Hub does not exist by itself.

Africa already has regional and thematic Wikimedia networks.

These include organizations and initiatives working on:

women and gender equity

African languages

photography

education

health

cultural heritage

environmental knowledge

youth participation

regional Wikimedia communities

The Hub's emerging structure is intended to work with these regional and thematic organizations rather than eliminate them.

The development process has included organizations such as Africa Wiki Women, the West Africa Hub, the Africa Great Lakes Hub, the Central Africa Hub, and EARTH Hub.

Wiki In Africa: another important connection

Another organization worth knowing about is Wiki In Africa.

Wiki In Africa is a South African nonprofit that has been working since the WikiAfrica movement began in 2011. Its mission is to help ensure that African cultures, histories, peoples, biodiversity, and knowledge are represented more fully in the world's open knowledge commons.

Its programs include:

Wiki Loves Africa

Wiki Loves Women

WikiChallenge African Schools

WikiAfrica Environment

WikiAfrica Hour

WikiFundi

other community and open-knowledge initiatives

Wiki In Africa says that its work since 2014 has involved tens of thousands of participants and editors and hundreds of Wikimedia partner organizations and groups.

Wiki In Africa is also listed as a participant in the Pan-African Hub network.

Wiki In Africa contact information

Website: Wiki In Africa

General email: hello@wikiinafrica.org

Media inquiries: rachel@wikiinafrica.org

The organization's website currently provides both of these contacts.

What about the African diaspora?

There is another important piece to this story: African Wikimedia work does not stop at the borders of the continent.

Organizations such as AfroCROWD work with people of African descent around the world to increase participation in Wikimedia and free knowledge.

AfroCROWD was founded in 2015 and conducts Wikipedia and Wikimedia outreach, including edit-a-thons and collaborations with libraries, museums, archives, universities, cultural organizations, and other institutions.

AfroCROWD contact information

Website: AfroCROWD

Email: info@AfroCROWD.org

Contact page: AfroCROWD Contact

AfroCROWD's Wikimedia Meta-Wiki page also identifies info@AfroCROWD.org as its contact address.

This makes AfroCROWD an interesting bridge between African Wikimedia communities and the African diaspora.

How to contact the Pan-African Hub

The current Pan-African Hub Meta-Wiki page lists the following contact:

Email: wikipanafricanhub@gmail.com

Main information page:

Wikimedia Pan-African Hub – Meta-Wiki

The Meta-Wiki page also provides information about the Hub's governance, meetings, community activities, framework, programs, and participating organizations.

Monthly community meetings

The Pan-African Hub's current Meta-Wiki portal includes Monthly Community Meetings as well as the Afrika Baraza Learning Series.

These are particularly useful for someone who wants to understand what African Wikimedians are discussing and where new projects are developing.

A growing movement

The creation of the Pan-African Hub represents an important development in the history of Wikimedia in Africa.

African Wikimedians have been organizing for many years through national groups, language communities, regional networks, Wiki Loves Africa, Wiki Indaba, Africa Wiki Women, Wiki In Africa, and numerous local Wikimedia communities.

The Pan-African Hub adds another layer: continental collaboration.

It creates a space where an editor in Senegal can potentially connect with an editor in Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroon, South Africa, Niger, Tanzania, or another African country.

And it creates opportunities for people outside the continent to participate as well.

For African Americans and the African diaspora

For those of us in the African diaspora, this raises an interesting possibility.

The question does not have to be:

"How can we help Africa?"

It can instead be:

"How can African communities on the continent and in the diaspora learn from one another and contribute to a shared knowledge commons?"

That could include documenting family histories, African American connections to Africa, migration histories, African intellectual traditions, environmental knowledge, cultural traditions, oral histories, photographs, archives, biographies, and underrepresented subjects.

Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons can become places where these connections are documented and made accessible to future generations.

Staying connected

Here are the main starting points:

Wikimedia Pan-African Hub

Website/Meta-Wiki: Pan-African Hub

Email: wikipanafricanhub@gmail.com

Wiki In Africa

Website: wikiinafrica.org

Email: hello@wikiinafrica.org

Media: rachel@wikiinafrica.org

AfroCROWD

Website: afrocrowd.org

Email: info@AfroCROWD.org

Contact: AfroCROWD Contact Page

Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

Wikimedia Meta-Wiki

The larger idea

The Pan-African Wikimedia movement is ultimately about more than editing Wikipedia.

It is about who creates knowledge, whose knowledge becomes visible, what languages are represented, and how communities preserve their own histories for the future.

In an age when artificial intelligence systems are increasingly drawing information from Wikipedia and other open sources, this work becomes even more significant.

The people who document knowledge today are helping shape the information environment that future generations—and increasingly, AI systems—will learn from.

That makes African participation in the Wikimedia movement not simply a question of increasing the number of Wikipedia articles.

It is also a question of knowledge, representation, memory, and participation.

The current contact fot The Pan-African Hub page was updated September 3, 2026, and currently lists wikipanafricanhub@gmail.com. 

Meta-Wiki