A Joburg Texan to run Wikipedia

CEO of Harambee in SA appointed to lead Wikimedia Foundation

Maryana Iskander’s next job is a mouthful. According to the trustees at the Wikimedia Foundation, who appointed her CEO, “she is a globally recognised social entrepreneur and an expert in building cross-sector partnerships that combine innovative technology with community-led solutions to close opportunity gaps”.

Iskander, 46, a Texan who now considers herself a full-blown South African, explains it better with her home-state-spun simplicity. She says the task will involve welding together knowledge, technology, and people — just like her work at Harambee Youth Employment Accelerator, which involved liasing between the private sector, public sector and social sector. “No institution or community can get big things done alone,” she says.

She’s had experience working across those boundaries, beginning with the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, a volunteer-led social movement focused on access to health care. Currently she runs Harambee in SA. As with Planned Parenthood, Iskander began both jobs as a volunteer.

It was Ann Richards, a formidable US politician and once Democratic governor of Texas, who persuaded her to go to Planned Parenthood, where Iskander became COO.

She worked there for six years before

“love and life” brought her to SA and she was introduced to another social entrepreneur, Nicola Galombik, who founded Harambee in 2010.

The Harambee project was initially established by social investment company Yellowwoods and the National Treasury’s Jobs Fund. It prepares young people for the world of work.

“We help get them jobs and reduce barriers they face searching for work,” says Iskander, who worked as a volunteer for three months, was COO for nine months, and then became CEO in 2013.

Iskander was born in Egypt; when she

Social entrepreneur

was four her parents moved to the US so that her father could do his PhD in chemistry at Washington State University. “That was a time when immigrants could really count on America,” she says.

From there her parents, both pharmacists by training, took the family to the University of Texas in Austin where Iskander grew up in a place with a typical Lone Star state name, Round Rock. She studied sociology at Rice University, a three-hour drive down the road to Houston.

She won a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford, where she completed an MSc, followed by a brief stint (she emphasises “brief”) with McKinsey, and then went to law school. At Yale she obtained a JD (juris doctor and the equivalent of a PhD) before clerking for another formidable woman, judge Diane P Wood, in the US Court of Appeals for the seventh circuit. She then went to work at her alma mater Rice University.

With all that academic learning behind her, Iskander never got around to practising law. Instead, she was lured away by Richards, who was succeeded as Texas governor by one George W Bush.

One of Iskander’s immediate objectives at the Wikimedia Foundation, the global nonprofit organisation that supports Wikipedia and 12 other free-knowledge projects, will be to promote greater diversity.

“This is about inviting more people to contribute to creating and sharing knowledge,” she says. Wikipedia is available in more than 300 languages but, according to observers, is perceived as still too Western and too English. “As an example of what we need to improve, only 5% of the geotagged content on

Wikipedia is about the entire continent of Africa,” she says.

Wikimedia’s mission, she says, is to

“ensure that we can all share in the sum of human knowledge”. Wikipedia is the most popular and familiar free-knowledge project, but the organisation also includes Wikimedia Commons, whose goal is to increase free access to photographs and images — it already has 75-million uploads, which is a good start. One project started by the African affiliates is to upload more photographs that can help change the perception of the continent.

According to a statement by the foundation, Iskander “will champion the organisation’s goal to ensure that people everywhere can access and share knowledge freely”.

She will begin her new job on January 5 and says she will be based “mostly on a screen and on lots of planes”. Iskander is no stranger to flying. She is already looking to add a 70th country to her list. Reluctant to rate them in any order, among the countries that surprised her were Japan, Montenegro and Namibia.

Namibia? “Come on,” she says, “where else will you find a desert and a sea side by side like that? It’s just remarkable.” Her next destination could not be more different, or prosaic. But the new job will certainly be remarkable.