Case Study 2: Africa Check — Fact-Checking in Low-Resource Environments

Overview

Africa Check, founded in 2012, is the oldest fact-checking organization in Africa and one of the most widely cited examples of how fact-checking methodology can be successfully adapted for non-Western, low-resource information environments. Operating with bureaus in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, Cameroon, and Ethiopia, Africa Check has developed distinctive approaches to verification, distribution, and impact assessment that differ significantly from the Western fact-checking models on which the organization was partially based at its founding.

This case study examines Africa Check's institutional development, its methodology adaptations for African information contexts, its language coverage strategy, its funding model and sustainability challenges, and the documented evidence for its impact. It also examines the larger lessons the Africa Check case offers for fact-checking organizations seeking to operate in low-resource language environments with limited institutional support.

Background: The African Information Landscape

Understanding Africa Check's distinctive methodology requires understanding the information environment in which it operates. Africa's information landscape varies enormously by country, region, and urban/rural location, but several common characteristics shape the fact-checking challenge:

Mobile-first information access: The majority of Africans accessing digital information do so through mobile devices, with high smartphone penetration in urban areas and significant feature-phone usage in rural areas. This mobile-first reality shapes what content formats are consumed, what platforms carry political information, and what verification tools can be accessed.

WhatsApp and Facebook dominance: Unlike Western contexts where multiple platforms compete for attention, in many African countries WhatsApp and Facebook are the primary digital news platforms. Twitter/X has significant usage among educated urban elites but does not reach the broad populations that WhatsApp and Facebook reach. This platform concentration means that misinformation strategies focus on these two platforms, and that fact-checking partnerships with these platforms are the most consequential.

Radio as primary information source: In many rural African contexts, radio remains the primary information source. Community radio stations reach populations that smartphones do not, and radio is consumed by populations with limited literacy. Misinformation distributed by radio — including by state-affiliated radio during elections — requires specific response strategies that text-based fact-checking cannot provide.

Institutional trust variation: Trust in government, media, and international organizations varies significantly across African contexts. In post-conflict countries, trust in institutions is often severely depleted. In countries with histories of state-controlled media, mainstream press is treated with the skepticism that institutional performance has warranted. International NGO-affiliated organizations face their own credibility challenges in contexts sensitized to neo-colonial dynamics in aid and development.

Language diversity: Sub-Saharan Africa is the most linguistically diverse region on Earth, with over 2,000 languages. Major urban African languages (Swahili in East Africa, Hausa in West Africa, Zulu and Xhosa in South Africa) each have tens of millions of speakers, but the diversity of languages in any given country makes comprehensive multilingual coverage extremely difficult for any single organization.

Africa Check's Institutional Development

Founding and Initial Model

Africa Check was founded by Peter Cunliffe-Jones, a former AFP journalist, with initial funding from the African Media Initiative and the French Embassy. The founding model closely followed the established fact-checking approaches of PolitiFact and FactCheck.org in the United States: journalistic fact-checkers evaluating specific claims made by public figures, assigning truth ratings, and publishing findings on a dedicated website.

This initial model faced immediate adaptation challenges. The political claim landscape in Africa differs from the US: fewer politicians make specific quantifiable claims amenable to systematic rating; election-period misinformation involves more completely fabricated content and less disputed interpretations of statistics; and the viral misinformation circulating on WhatsApp and Facebook required response strategies different from the broadcast-media claim-checking approach.

Methodological Evolution

Over its first decade, Africa Check evolved its methodology in response to the specific demands of the African information environment. Key evolutions:

Shift from politician fact-checking to viral content fact-checking: Africa Check's early output focused primarily on checking claims by politicians. By 2016–2017, the organization had substantially shifted toward fact-checking viral social media content — images, videos, and text messages circulating on WhatsApp and Facebook that were not attributable to specific politicians but were reaching large audiences.

Development of multimedia verification protocols: As video and image content became the dominant format of viral misinformation, Africa Check invested in developing multimedia verification protocols adapted to the specific challenges of African contexts. These include: protocols for verifying the provenance of videos using geolocation against African geographic databases; protocols for identifying out-of-context African imagery repurposed for election misinformation; and partnerships with technology providers offering reverse video search capabilities.

Audience research integration: Africa Check commissioned systematic audience research to understand what content its target audiences actually encountered, what they wanted fact-checked, and through what channels they could be reached with corrections. This audience research shaped distribution strategy more than comparable Western fact-checking organizations, which typically rely on website traffic and social media reach as proxies for impact.

Language Coverage Strategy

The Language Challenge

Africa Check's primary operational languages are English, French, and Portuguese — the colonial languages that serve as official and lingua franca languages across its coverage areas. This creates a fundamental limitation: the misinformation that most urgently needs fact-checking, which circulates among mass audiences in indigenous African languages, is not covered by the organization's primary output.

Swahili Coverage

East Africa's most widely spoken indigenous language, Swahili, has received specific attention from Africa Check. The organization has published fact-checks in Swahili and developed relationships with Swahili-language media for content distribution. Swahili fact-checking is more tractable than coverage of smaller indigenous languages because: (1) Swahili has a substantial written press tradition in Tanzania and Kenya; (2) Swahili NLP tools are more developed than those for most other African languages; (3) A single language covers tens of millions of speakers across East Africa.

Radio Partnerships

Recognizing that radio reaches populations that digital channels do not, Africa Check has developed partnerships with community radio stations in several countries. These partnerships allow Africa Check to translate and broadcast its fact-checks through radio, reaching rural and lower-literacy audiences who cannot access website-published fact-checks. The radio partnership model requires significant investment in translation and broadcast-ready production formats beyond standard web-based fact-checking output.

SMS Fact-Checking

In low-bandwidth environments, Africa Check has experimented with SMS-based fact-checking services that allow users to submit queries via text message and receive fact-check responses through the same channel. This approach extends verification access to feature-phone users without reliable internet connections.

Verification Methodology Adaptations

African-Specific Data Sources

Standard Western fact-checking relies heavily on institutional data sources: US Census Bureau, Eurostat, national statistics offices with reliable and publicly accessible data. African fact-checking often operates with less reliable, less accessible, or more contested official data.

Africa Check has developed relationships with: the African Development Bank's statistical database, UN Economic Commission for Africa data, national statistics offices in its coverage countries (with documented reliability assessments), and academic research centers with African-specific datasets. The organization has also developed in-house expertise in assessing the reliability of different African official statistics sources — expertise that is not available to researchers unfamiliar with African institutional contexts.

Election Claim Verification

During election periods, Africa Check deploys election-specific verification protocols adapted to African electoral contexts:

Electoral commission data verification: Africa Check works directly with national electoral commissions to verify electoral data claims, identifying which data is officially published and which is not, and tracking changes in official data that might indicate manipulation.

Results tabulation monitoring: During counting and tabulation periods, Africa Check monitors for false claims about results in specific constituencies, verifying against official tabulation processes and partnering with election observation networks.

Candidate biographical verification: False claims about candidates' qualifications, histories, and records are common in African elections. Africa Check has developed protocols for verifying educational credentials, professional histories, and financial disclosure records using African institutional data.

Health Misinformation Protocols

Health misinformation — false claims about treatments, disease causation, vaccine safety, and medical procedures — has been a consistently high-priority Africa Check area, particularly during the COVID-19 pandemic. Africa Check's health fact-checking partners with: the Africa CDC, WHO Africa Regional Office, national health ministries (with reliability assessments), and academic health researchers at African universities.

The COVID-19 period was a significant stress test for health fact-checking capacity. Africa Check, in partnership with other African fact-checking organizations through the African Fact-Checking Alliance, attempted to maintain systematic coverage of health misinformation across the continent — an effort that revealed the capacity gaps between need and available resources.

Funding Model and Sustainability

Current Funding Structure

Africa Check's primary funding comes from a combination of international foundations (including the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Google.org, Meta, and the Open Society Foundations), government development aid programs (British Council, UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office, French Development Agency), and earned income from training programs and consulting services.

The heavy dependence on international (primarily Western) foundation and government funding creates several sustainability challenges:

Perceptions of foreign influence: Organizations funded by US-based foundations or Western governments face perceptions in some African political contexts of serving foreign rather than local interests. This perception is exploited by political actors whose claims are being fact-checked, who characterize Africa Check as a tool of Western information control.

Grant cycle uncertainty: Foundation grants typically run for one to three years, creating uncertainty about organizational continuity that makes long-term hiring and infrastructure investment difficult. The effort required to maintain multiple grant relationships is itself a significant organizational overhead.

Revenue diversification: Africa Check has attempted to diversify revenue through training programs (training journalists and students in fact-checking methodology), consulting services (advising organizations on misinformation response), and earned media partnerships. These revenue streams remain small relative to grant income.

The Global Fact Check Fund

The IFCN's Global Fact Check Fund, launched in 2023 with initial support from multiple donors, represents an attempt to provide more stable, consolidated funding specifically for Global South fact-checking organizations including Africa Check. The fund provides grants based on demonstrated impact and organizational need, reducing the administrative burden of maintaining multiple bilateral grant relationships.

Documented Impact

Measuring Impact of Fact-Checking

Impact assessment is one of the most methodologically difficult problems in fact-checking evaluation. Standard metrics — website traffic, social media shares of fact-checks, media pickups — measure reach but not belief change or behavioral impact. Africa Check has invested more systematically in impact research than many peer organizations, commissioning audience surveys and experimental studies where resources allow.

Election Period Impact

During Kenya's 2022 election, Africa Check documented specific cases where its fact-checks demonstrably affected the circulation of false claims: - Multiple news organizations that had republished false election-related claims subsequently issued corrections citing Africa Check's fact-checks. - Electoral Commission of Kenya cited Africa Check fact-checks in its own public communications correcting misinformation about voting procedures. - Social media posts debunked by Africa Check received reduced algorithmic amplification on Facebook after fact-check labels were applied — the most direct measurable effect of the platform partnership.

COVID-19 Health Outcomes

Research on Africa Check's health misinformation debunking during COVID-19 found evidence that communities exposed to its corrections through radio partnerships showed higher vaccination intention rates than comparison communities, though methodological limitations of the study design make causal inference difficult.

Journalist Training Impact

Africa Check's journalist training programs — conducted across Africa through workshops, online courses, and university partnerships — have documented hundreds of participants who have subsequently applied fact-checking skills in their professional work. This capacity-building impact may be the organization's most durable contribution to African information ecosystems, creating distributed verification capacity rather than centralizing all fact-checking within one organization.

Lessons and Implications

Lesson 1: Format Must Match Information Ecosystem

Africa Check's shift from politician-statement fact-checking to viral-content fact-checking, and its investment in radio and SMS distribution alongside web publishing, reflect the overriding lesson that fact-checking organizations must serve the information ecosystem their audiences actually inhabit, not the one that is most convenient to address. Fact-checks published only in English on websites are irrelevant to audiences consuming misinformation in Swahili via WhatsApp audio clips.

Lesson 2: Capacity-Building Multiplies Impact

Individual fact-checks reach the specific false claims they address. Journalist training, university curriculum integration, and community radio partnerships create distributed verification capacity that can address many more false claims than any single organization can directly investigate. The multiplier effect of capacity-building is potentially more significant long-term than the organization's direct fact-checking output.

Lesson 3: Independence is an Active Maintenance Challenge

Africa Check's organizational independence — its willingness to fact-check claims by all political parties, by government officials, and by civil society organizations regardless of political affiliation — has been its primary source of credibility. Maintaining that independence requires active institutional design: clear editorial independence policies, transparent funding disclosure, governance structures that insulate editorial decisions from donor preferences, and demonstrated willingness to check claims by actors associated with funders' political sympathies.

Lesson 4: Low-Resource Language Coverage Requires Structural Innovation

No single organization can achieve comprehensive coverage of the hundreds of languages relevant to African misinformation with a generalist staff model. Structural innovations needed include: AI-assisted translation pipelines for producing multilingual content at scale; volunteer contributor networks for regional and local languages; regional media partnerships that embed multilingual fact-checking capacity in existing local news organizations; and data-sharing frameworks that allow fact-checks in one language to be rapidly adapted for another.

Lesson 5: Funding Must Match the Scale of the Problem

The gap between the resources available to African fact-checking organizations and the scale of the misinformation problem they face is enormous. Africa Check, with a staff of several dozen across multiple countries, addresses an information environment serving over a billion people in hundreds of languages. Sustained investment — from platforms that profit from African users, from development organizations that recognize information integrity as a development issue, and from African governments where press freedom allows — is the necessary foundation for closing this gap.

Discussion Questions

1. Africa Check is primarily funded by international (Western) foundations and governments. How should the organization manage the tension between accepting this funding (necessary for operation) and maintaining perceived independence from foreign influence in the eyes of its audiences?

2. Africa Check has documented the gap between English/French-language fact-checking output and the audience-reaching regional-language misinformation. Design a specific strategy for Africa Check to expand Hausa-language fact-checking in West Africa within a two-year timeline, specifying staff, partnerships, funding, and distribution channels.

3. The radio partnership model allows Africa Check to reach rural, lower-literacy audiences. What content format adaptations are needed to make fact-checks suitable for radio broadcast, and what are the tradeoffs compared to online publication?

4. Africa Check's impact on election misinformation in Kenya demonstrates measurable effects through the platform partnership channel (Facebook labels). What additional impact measurement approaches would help Africa Check demonstrate its value to funders and policymakers?

5. The African Fact-Checking Alliance coordination during COVID-19 was described as revealing "the capacity gaps between need and available resources." Design a coordinated multi-organization African fact-checking network for the next major health crisis, specifying what shared infrastructure would be needed and what governance would coordinate the response.