ABOUT

Wiki Loves Africa is an annual public photographic contest where people across Africa can contribute media (photographs, video, and audio) about their environment to Wikimedia Commons for use on Wikipedia and other project websites of the Wikimedia Foundation. The competition is organised by Wiki In Africa.

At its heart, it is an annual competition that crowdsources photographs, videos, and recordings of Africa to form an open licensed archive of materials that tells the story of Africa on Wikipedia through the eyes of its people. It is so much more … since 2014, the project has achieved the following things:

    • Over 118,953 images have been entered by 9,182 competitors from up to 55 countries under a free licence (CC-BY-SA).
    • 33 Wikimedia communities from 26 African countries have hosted participation events, information sessions and training workshops.
    • At least 400 participation and training events have been held by participating communities between 2014 and 2024.
    • 17% of the images submitted to Wiki Loves Africa are used across 437 Wikimedia projects (e.g. specific language Wikipedia and Wikiquote)
    • The competition attracts high levels of new contributors to the Wikimedia projects – an average of 75% of participants are newbies. (This figure is down from 80%, showing that our photographers are returning year after year!)
    • The images entered into Wiki Loves Africa are viewed on average over 24.6 million times monthly.
    • Wiki Loves Africa’s images from the first 10 years have been viewed over 1,8 billion times.
    • A Wiki Loves Africa prize-winning image was included in the Journeys Through Our Fragile Heritage exhibition at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
    • Wiki Loves Africa’s ISA Tool won the 2019 WikiData Best Multimedia Tool Award and the Wikimedia Coolest Tool Award in 2024.
    • A Wiki Loves Africa image, “Firefighter, Ashton Bay, March 2017″, submitted by South African photographer Steven Terblanche to Wiki Loves Africa 2017, was placed 3rd in the Picture of the Year 2021 award.

You can view the international winning images from all years below.

Wiki Loves Africa encourages participants to contribute media that illustrate a specific theme for that year.

Wiki Loves Africa is a Wiki In Africa project activated by the Wikimedia community that created Wikipedia to support the WikiAfrica movement. The competition was created and is managed by Florence Devouard and Isla Haddow-Flood of Wiki In Africa as a fun and engaging way to rebalance the lack of visual representations and relevant content about Africa on Wikipedia. The Wikimedia Foundation funds the competition. Wiki Loves Africa has been supported by UNESCO, the African Union, and a host of local partners in individual countries. The images donated are available online and beyond under the Creative Commons license CC BY SA 4.0.

Partners:

Wiki In Africa would like to thank the Wikimedia Foundation for its continued financial support since its inception and ynternet.org for hosting the competition in 2016, 2017, and 2019. We would also like to thank UNESCO’s Unite4Heritage project, with the help of Wikipedian in Residence John Cummings, for their support on social media from 2016 until 2019.

Collaborating groups in countries:

The project could not function without the intrepid volunteers and groups that host key events in their countries. The following established groups listed below are hosting Wiki Loves Africa events in their countries in 2025.