From Niger Delta to the World: Our Wiki Loves Africa 2026 Story – Diff

Nigeria’s Niger Delta is often introduced to the world through crude oil. The region is one of the country’s major oil-producing areas, but oil is only one part of its story.

Across the Niger Delta are communities with rich traditions, ceremonies, festivals, oral histories, music, dance, craftsmanship, and indigenous knowledge passed down through generations. Many of these practices are deeply connected to the identity of the people who preserve them. Still much of this cultural heritage is under-documented and, in an increasingly digital world, at risk of becoming less visible.

So, what happens when we look beyond the oil?

That was one of the questions that shaped our participation in Wiki Loves Africa 2026 campaign, whose theme, Rites & Rituals, invited Africans to document the cultural practices and traditions that define their communities.

For us, the campaign was an opportunity to tell a different story about the Niger Delta: one centred on its people, their cultures and the many rites and rituals that continue to shape community life.

The result was a regional campaign that mobilised over 200 people, trained 30 selected storytellers, photographers and videographers, generated more than 1,400 images alongside videos and audio recordings, an entry winning the best reportage video prize and created opportunities for new contributors to join the Wikimedia movement.

But beyond the numbers, one story from the campaign would travel much further than we expected.

Planning

The journey began in November 2025, when the organising team started planning for Wiki Loves Africa 2026 in the Niger Delta.

We brainstormed different ways of bringing the campaign closer to communities. Since December is a festive period across many parts of the region, one of our early ideas was to attend festivals and document cultural activities taking place during the season. However, the timing of the grant meant that we could not fully implement those initial plans.

Instead, we began building a campaign that could equip people to continue the documentation work in their own communities.

The idea was simple: rather than having a small organising team attempt to document rites and rituals all over the Niger Delta, we would identify and train photographers, storytellers, videographers and other creatives from across the region and enable them to tell the stories of the communities they knew best.

Mobilising storytellers across the Niger Delta

In collaboration with Art in the Garden City, we launched a regional call for participants and targeted creatives across the Niger Delta states.

The response was encouraging. More than 200 people were mobilised during the campaign, while 71 applications were received for the bootcamp, only 30 were selected. Because of logistics, a larger proportion of the selected participants came from Rivers State, but the campaign deliberately sought representation from across the region.

Among those who responded were photographers, videographers, storytellers, historians, researchers, cultural practitioners, filmmakers, and content creators.

The quality of the applicants also showed us something important: there was already a pool of talented creatives interested in documenting the region. What was needed was an opportunity, some training and a platform through which their work could become part of the global open knowledge ecosystem.

Introducing Wiki Loves Africa

Before the physical training activities began, we organised a virtual launch to introduce participants and other stakeholders to Wiki Loves Africa and the 2026 Rites & Rituals theme.

The virtual event brought together 44 participants from different communities and cultural organisations across the region and a panel including Florence Devouard, Ambassador Olushola Olaniyan, President of Wikimedia Nigeria, representatives of Arts in the Garden City, Mr. Ayokanmi Oyeyemi and other creative and cultural stakeholders.

The session was also an opportunity to show participants how they could contribute to Wikimedia Commons and understand the wider purpose behind the competition.

The session was facilitated by Umasoye Igwe,  helping participants navigate the introduction to Wiki Loves Africa and the contribution process.

The virtual launch was followed by a physical launch and heritage documentation workshop in Port Harcourt, hosted at the British Council in partnership with Arts in the Garden City. The event attracted more than 20 participants.

From training to action

The next major stage was the Wiki Loves Africa 2026 Niger Delta bootcamp.

Following a competitive selection process, 30 storytellers, photographers and videographers from across the region were selected for an intensive training programme in Port Harcourt.

The training went beyond photography.

Participants explored culture and heritage as tools for peacebuilding, youth-led community development through digital storytelling, heritage preservation, ethical storytelling, and community engagement. They also received practical sessions on Wikimedia Commons, digital archiving, photography for heritage preservation, videography, and filmmaking.

The goal was not simply to teach people how to take better photographs or make videos.

It was to help them understand why documentation matters, how to document communities ethically, and how to make that documentation available as part of the world’s shared knowledge.

Taking the classroom into the community

The most memorable part of the training was taking participants out of the classroom and into a living cultural setting.

Participants undertook a guided cultural photowalk in the host community of Barako Kingdom in Ogoni Land, Rivers State, where the community was celebrating the beginning of a new planting season, known as Umu-La-Gia.

This was an important part of the campaign because participants were able to put the lessons from the training into practice immediately.

They were not documenting an abstract idea of culture. They were documenting people, places, ceremonies, and practices as they happened.

And this field experience would eventually become one of the most significant moments in the entire campaign.

From the Niger Delta to the international stage

Among the stories captured during the campaign was a video documenting a rite in the Barako community.

The work was submitted to Wiki Loves Africa 2026 and went on to receive international recognition in the Reportage Video category.

For our team, the achievement was especially meaningful because the work emerged from an activity that had been designed as part of the local training experience.

A participant who had joined our campaign was able to take the opportunity provided by the bootcamp and field documentation activity and turn it into a story that reached an international audience.

WLA International Winner: Joshua Israel Films, Rites & Rituals (Pattern of Obedience) 

The achievement reminded us that community campaigns can have outcomes that go far beyond the original project plan. A local documentation exercise can become a global story.

Beyond the Niger Delta’s Oil

The winning entry was only one of many stories captured during the campaign.

The Rites & Rituals theme encouraged participants to look at their communities through a much broader lens: festivals, traditional rites, wrestling competitions, indigenous ceremonies, cultural performances, historical landmarks and oral traditions were all part of the documentation effort.

This mattered particularly in the Niger Delta.

The region is frequently discussed through the lens of its oil resources and the environmental, economic, and political issues associated with them. Those realities are important, but they do not capture the full identity of the people who live there.

Through Wiki Loves Africa, our participants were able to document another side of the region: its rituals, celebrations, heritage sites, creative expressions and everyday cultural practices.

The resulting collection is a growing visual record of communities telling their own stories.

Beyond the campaign: building Wikimedia contributors

One of the most important outcomes of the project was the opportunity to introduce new people to Wikimedia.

By the end of the campaign, 61 new contributors and accounts had been created, alongside 10 existing contributors who participated in the project. The campaign also created three Wikimedia Commons categories for organising the resulting media.

The campaign generated:

• 1,446 images
• 10 videos
• 3 audio files
• 61 new contributors/accounts
• 10 existing contributors
• 3 Wikimedia Commons categories

These contributions mean that the documentation created through the campaign can continue to serve purposes beyond the competition. The files can be discovered, reused, and connected to Wikimedia projects, helping bring local cultural knowledge into a global open knowledge environment.

Taking the model further

The campaign also extended beyond the initial Niger Delta activities.

Through a collaboration with the Peter Bello Foundation and the Cross River Carnival Commission, the documentation and Wikimedia model was replicated in Calabar. The programme included a creative industry seminar, heritage documentation training, Wikimedia knowledge sessions and panel discussions, followed by an Old Calabar heritage photowalk and documentation of historical sites and cultural landmarks.

The Calabar activities attracted 40 participants, adding another dimension to the campaign’s regional reach.

This extension reinforced an idea that had been central to our original approach: give people the knowledge and tools to document their communities, and the documentation can continue beyond the activities organised directly by the project team.

The impact in numbers

The scale of the campaign became clearer when we looked at the numbers.

200+ people were mobilised across the Niger Delta.

71 applications were received.

30 participants were selected for the bootcamp.

44 people participated in the virtual launch.

20+ attended the physical launch and workshop.

40 participated in the Calabar seminar.

The campaign involved 4 facilitators, 3 volunteers, and 3 judges.

Most importantly, the campaign generated 1,446 images, 10 videos, and 3 audio files and helped create 61 new contributor accounts.

Behind every number is a person who chose to document a community, learn something new or share a story that might otherwise have remained outside the global digital record.

The people behind the campaign

A campaign of this scale could not have happened through the work of one person.

It was made possible through the collaboration of organisers, facilitators, volunteers, Wikimedia community members, cultural practitioners, creative organisations and participants across the region.

Project Lead: Michael Diala
Assistant Project Lead: Umasoye Franca Igwe
Creative Volunteers: Armstrong Opulency, Juliet, Nubel Bariloe, and Majesty Barikor
Judges: Dr. Carolyn Seaman, Gaspard Linouenuo Koutchika, Umasoye Franca Igwe

The organisers’ roles varied, from planning and mobilisation to training, communications design, facilitation, field coordination, participant support, judging and documentation.

For me, being part of the organising team was an opportunity to contribute to a campaign that connected Wikimedia’s open knowledge mission with the cultural heritage of the Niger Delta,  while also learning what it takes to move a regional idea from planning into action.

What we learned

One of our biggest lessons was that documenting culture requires people to understand the value of documentation. They need to know how to approach communities ethically, how to tell stories responsibly, and how to use platforms such as Wikimedia Commons.

They also need opportunities to practice.

The Barako field experience demonstrated the value of combining training with real-world documentation. Participants were able to move immediately from learning about heritage documentation to applying those skills in a community setting.

We also learned the importance of decentralising the work.

The Niger Delta is too diverse and geographically broad for a small organising team to tell all its stories alone. By working with creatives from different communities and encouraging participants to continue documenting in their own states, the campaign created a wider network of people capable of telling local stories.

And perhaps most importantly, we learned that local stories can travel.

A story captured in a community in the Niger Delta can become part of a global Wikimedia collection. A participant who joins a local campaign can become an internationally recognised storyteller.

Looking beyond Wiki Loves Africa 2026

The campaign may have ended, but the stories remain.

The images, videos and audio recordings uploaded during Wiki Loves Africa 2026 create a digital record of the cultural heritage documented by participants across the Niger Delta. The Wikimedia Commons collection gives these stories a place where they can remain accessible and potentially be reused across Wikimedia projects and beyond.

For us, the most meaningful outcome is not simply the number of files uploaded or the number of people who participated.

It is the fact that more people now have the tools and experience to document their own communities.

The Niger Delta has many stories to tell. There are stories of rites and rituals, festivals and ceremonies, landscapes and landmarks, music and dance, food and craftsmanship, history and memory.

There are stories beyond oil. And through Wiki Loves Africa 2026, we were able to help some of those stories travel from the Niger Delta to the world.

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