Sandister Tei ( ) is a Ghanaian media professional who was named the Wikimedian of the Year in October 2020 by Wikipedia co-founder

Jimmy Wales Jimmy Donal Wales (born August 7, 1966), also known as Jimbo Wales, is an American List of Internet entrepreneurs, Internet entrepreneur and former Trader (finance), financial trader. He is a Founders of Wikipedia, co-founder of the non-profi ...

during

Wikimania Wikimania is the Wikimedia movement's annual conference, organized by Wikimedian, volunteers and hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation. Topics of presentations and discussions include Wikimedia projects such as Wikipedia, other wikis, open-source ...

2020. She is a co-founder and dedicated volunteer of the Wikimedia Ghana User Group.

Early life and education

Tei was born in

Accra Accra (; or ''Gaga''; ; Ewe: Gɛ; ) is the capital and largest city of Ghana, located on the southern coast at the Gulf of Guinea, which is part of the Atlantic Ocean. As of 2021 census, the Accra Metropolitan District, , had a population of ...

, Ghana. She went to

Achimota School Achimota School (Help:IPA/English, /ɑːtʃimoʊtɑː/ ), formerly Prince of Wales College and School at Achimota, later Achimota College, now nicknamed Motown, is a co-educational boarding school located at Achimota in Accra, Greater Accra Reg ...

, later the

University of Ghana The University of Ghana is a public university located in Accra, Ghana. It is the oldest public university in the country. The university was founded in 1948 as the University College of the Gold Coast in the British colony of the Gold Coast ...

, where she majored in Geography and was awarded a scholarship by the Tullow Group in 2013 to take a master's degree in international journalism at

Cardiff University Cardiff University () is a public research university in Cardiff, Wales. It was established in 1883 as the University College of South Wales and Monmouthshire and became a founding college of the University of Wales in 1893. It was renamed Unive ...

Career

Following her masters in

, Tei joined

Al Jazeera Al Jazeera Media Network (AJMN; , ) is a private-media conglomerate headquartered in Wadi Al Sail, Doha, funded in part by the government of Qatar. The network's flagship channels include Al Jazeera Arabic and Al Jazeera English, which pro ...

's digital channel AJ+ in 2014. She later worked at Joy FM briefly as a social media executive and moved to Citi FM as a multimedia journalist. Tei later joined the Traffic Avenue drive time show as a side-kick for Jessica Opare-Saforo. She was also the presenter for Tech and Social Media trends on the award-winning Citi Breakfast Show. Until she departed from Citi, she was the Deputy Programs Manager for Citi FM and Citi TV. Aside from her roles in broadcast media, Tei also was a digital media trainer who facilitated training for Young African Leaders Initiative,

Voice of America Voice of America (VOA or VoA) is an international broadcasting network funded by the federal government of the United States that by law has editorial independence from the government. It is the largest and oldest of the American internation ...

, Office of the Mayor of Accra. Tei has worked for the

Wikimedia Foundation The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. (WMF) is an American 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, and registered there as foundation (United States law), a charitable foundation. It is the host of Wikipedia, th ...

since 2021.

Wikimedia activity

Tei is the co-founder of Wikimedia Ghana User Group, a community of Ghanaian Wikimedians which was created in 2012. Her volunteer work there included recruiting Wikipedia editors and other outreach activities. She also helped launch a campaign to start a petition on Freedom of Panorama in Ghana in 2018 at re:publica Accra. She represented Wikimedia Ghana User Group in Washington DC to confer with organizers of 2012

about ways to increase African content on Wikipedia. The following year, she attended Wikimania in Hong Kong as part of a formal meetup of African editors, becoming the first woman in Ghana to attend such a meeting. She participated in the Wikimedia Summit 2019 in Berlin, promoting an increase in coverage on African topics on Wikimedia projects. One of her principal aims was to "realign" and "experience different perspectives". She was named the Wikimedian of the Year on 15 October 2020 by Wikipedia co-founder

in a live YouTube and Facebook broadcast. Tei was praised for her contributions to Wikimedia projects' coverage of the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

in Ghana, helping to keep a permanent record of the effects of the pandemic there. Because of travel restrictions, Wales could not personally deliver the award to Tei as per standard practice, but instead spoke to her in a surprise Zoom call.

Other works

While in Wales, she was diagnosed with depression and her subsequent treatment helped improve both her mood and her grades; she then founded Purple People, a mental health support group (now inactive) for people with

mood disorders A mood disorder, also known as an affective disorder, is any of a group of conditions of mental and behavioral disorder where the main underlying characteristic is a disturbance in the person's mood. The classification is in the ''Diagnostic ...

, years after she battled depression herself.

References

External links