On a pan-African scale, the Africa Check website has been operating since 2012 to promote accuracy and honesty in public debate and the media in Africa.
The organization has four official offices in Nairobi, Johannesburg, Lagos, and Dakar. In Senegal, the Africa Check office covers French-speaking Africa thanks to editor-in-chief Assane Diagne, who has been leading his team since 2015. This French version of the Africa Check website is an initiative developed by the AFP Foundation.
To support the development of fact-checking, Africa Check, in collaboration with Chequeado and Full Fact, conducted a research project in 2019 to identify the main challenges of fact-checking and misinformation. At the end of this research project, 11 notes were published to draw the main lessons on urgent issues facing fact-checkers.
The main questions were: Who believes and shares disinformation? What are the impacts and possible solutions to health misinformation? What is known about conspiracy beliefs?
The project also revealed major gaps in this area in countries in the Global South. Although there are a growing number of initiatives to develop fact-checking, as of October 2020 there were 21 initiatives on the African continent out of a total of 304 initiatives in the rest of the world, mainly in the United States and the United Kingdom*.
In an interview with Adweknow, Assane Diagne said that one of the main challenges of fact-checking in Africa was access to and quality of the data needed to carry out the verification work. The research project therefore highlights the urgent need for more fact-checking research to enable the ecosystem as a whole to move towards evidence-based fact-checking.
Read also: Interview with Assane Diagne, Editor-in-Chief of Africa Check –
Francophone
The final summary of the research project can be found here
*According to the Duke Reporters' Lab – October 2020