The sixth edition of West Africa’s pioneer and foremost verification platform, Dubawa’s Kwame Karikari Fact-checking Fellowship, began on Monday, February 26, 2024.
No fewer than 40 journalists, fact-checkers, and researchers across the West Africa sub-region were selected for this year’s edition of the initiative.
According to the organizers, the fellowship was inspired by the urgent need to deepen the fight against information disorder, amplify media literacy, and empower journalists with skills to further sanitize the mainstream media.
This year’s fellowship cut across Anglophone West Africa and also, for the first time, included training for journalists to do fact-checking in indigenous languages.
In his opening remarks of the mandatory four-day virtual training on Monday, Dapo Olorunyomi, the Chief Executive Officer and Founder of the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID), parent body for Dubawa, said the fellowship seeks to deepen the principle of factual journalism in a bid to give integrity and purpose to democracy.
He noted that the fellowship was named after the Ghanaian Professor of Journalism and Mass Communication, Kwame Karikari, for his role as an activist for freedom of expression, social justice, and democracy in Africa.
Olorunyomi said, “Information warfare has come to threaten democracy upon which the tenets of freedom of expression and access to information are built, hence the need for a strategic and deliberate response of building people with requisite skills to stem the tide of the disruption and distortion of information in the mainstream media.”
During the course of the training, fellows will be exposed to the dynamics of information disorder, the verification process, and learn about fact-checking skills and tools from experts in the industry.
While the mandatory training will end on Thursday, the fellowship will last for six months, during which participants will be attached to mentors for training and task execution.
The Kwame Karikari Fact-checking fellowship is supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Over the years, the fellowship has produced outstanding fellows whose work has won national, continental, and international recognitions.
