At its heart, Wiki Loves Africa drives Africans to document Africa. Both amateur and professional photographers and filmmakers are called to share the world they view daily, life recorded and observed from within their own communities. Their contributions form a collection of royalty-free images about Africa, a continent often subject to a condemning external gaze and many subsequent stereotypes.
Launched in 2014 by Isla Haddow-Flood and Florence Devouard, the contest is held annually, with photographers, filmmakers, and audiophiles submitting entries from across Africa for hosting on Wikipedia’s media library, Wikimedia Commons.
The project is open to entries from the whole continent. However, some specific actions (training, communication, etc.) are held in some countries with national organisers.
Wiki Loves Africa has achieved much over 12 years, from 2014 to 2026:
- Over 146,698 images have been entered by 11,343 unique competitors from up to 55 countries under a free licence (CC-BY-SA).
- 64 Wikimedia communities from 44 African countries (and Hiati & Brazil) have hosted participation events, information sessions, and training workshops.
- At least 417 participation and training events have been held by participating communities between 2014 and 2025.
- 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 a high of 89%, showing that our photographers are returning year after year!)
- 17% of the images submitted to Wiki Loves Africa are used across 306 Wikimedia projects (e.g. specific language Wikipedias and Wikiquote)
- Images entered into Wiki Loves Africa are viewed, on average, 36.9 million times per month (Aug 2025).
- Wiki Loves Africa’s images from the first 11 years have been viewed more than 2.4 billion times (Jan 2026).
- 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.
- A Wiki Loves Africa prize-winning image was included in the Journeys Through Our Fragile Heritage exhibition at the UNESCO headquarters in Paris.
- View all the international winning photographic images from all years on this page.
Wiki Loves Africa is a Wiki In Africa initiative that is activated by the Wikimedia community that created Wikipedia in support of the WikiAfrica movement. The competition was conceptualised and is managed by Florence Devouard and Isla Haddow-Flood of Wiki In Africa as a fun and engaging way to bridge the digital divide by rebalancing the lack of visual representations and relevant content that exists about Africa on Wikipedia. The competition is funded by the Wikimedia Foundation and supported in kind by UNESCO and a host of local partners in individual countries. The images donated are available for use on the internet and beyond, under the Creative Commons license CC BY SA 4.0.
TO ENTER THIS YEAR’S COMPETITION, CLICK HERE.
Read about the winners and the impact of each year’s contest:
