In 2005 I tried stimulating people in Mali to write for Wikipedia when I was in Bamako. Some articles were written, some more when I offered the equivalent of 1 US$ per article. With my limited knowledge of Bambara I added some more structure and I translated parts of the interface by asking if people understood the words I had found in a dictionary. For a long time almost nothing happened apart from inter-language bots and even spam bots and vandalism.
Today the Bambara Wikipedia reached 200 articles. Thanks to the great work of Misbaho, who has started contributing regularly about a month ago.
There is also a discussion going on in the Afrophonewikis group, about setting up an African chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation specifically for issues related to Wikimedia projects in African languages, which was started by Ibou, who has continuously been doing great work on the Wolof Wikipedia.