What 300 African Data Contributors Said About What Makes Them Stay

By Community Programs Team

Our 2025 contributor survey found that mentorship quality and community belonging — not technical tools — were the top two factors driving sustained open data contribution.

In mid-2025, we surveyed 300 African open data contributors — people who had contributed to at least one dataset on datum.africa or through a partner platform in the previous 12 months. We wanted to understand what motivated initial contribution, what sustained it, and what caused contributors to disengage.

The most important finding was also the most counterintuitive: technical tooling was the least important factor in contributor retention. When we asked contributors to rank the factors that most influenced whether they continued contributing, platform usability ranked sixth out of seven. Mentorship quality ranked first. Community belonging ranked second.

This surprised many people we shared the data with — particularly those who have built careers improving data platforms. The instinct in the technology sector is that retention is a product problem. Make the tool easier, faster, more intuitive, and contributors will stay. Our data says this instinct is largely wrong, at least for community data contributors in African contexts.

What actually matters: Contributors who received structured mentorship in their first 30 days were 3.2x more likely to still be contributing six months later. The quality of that mentorship mattered more than its format — whether it was one-on-one, group-based, or asynchronous. What contributors valued was a named person who knew their work, could answer their questions, and could connect them with others working on similar challenges.

Community belonging was the second-strongest predictor of retention. Contributors who reported feeling part of a community — who had peer connections, who participated in shared conversations, who knew other contributors by name — were dramatically more likely to stay active over time. This finding held across gender, country of origin, and prior experience level.

Motivation for initial contribution varied considerably. The largest single motivator was civic commitment: contributors who believed their data work would contribute to better outcomes for their communities. The second was skill development. Financial motivation — stipends, fellowships, paid roles — was a motivator for a significant minority but was rarely the primary driver.

The implications for program design are significant. Investing in mentorship infrastructure, in community building, and in giving contributors a meaningful sense of their impact produces better retention outcomes than improving the platform they contribute through. This is an argument for a different balance — one that treats the human infrastructure of open data contribution as at least as important as the technical infrastructure.