DUBAWA, a West African independent verification and fact-checking project, is hosting about 30 journalists and media practitioners in five West African countries for the sixth edition of the Kwame Karikari Fact-Checking Fellowship.
The fellowship, supported by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), spanned from March 2024 to August 2024 with the News Editor for Info Radio in the Upper West Region of Ghana participating in the fellowship.
It sought to amplify media literacy and empower journalists to champion information verification at the grassroots communities which were targeted constituencies for political, social, and cultural misinformation and disinformation.
The participating journalists and media practitioners of the fellowship were drawn from Nigeria, Ghana, Sierra Leone, Liberia, and The Gambia.
The six-month fellowship hosted by DUBAWA, an initiative of the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID), was preceded by a four-day intensive fellowship training to enable the participants to appreciate the concept of fact-checking before the commencement of the fellowship.
Mr Dapo Olorunyomi, the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of CJID, indicated that journalism played a crucial role in promoting modern democracy, good governance and development in West Africa.
He encouraged journalists to seize the opportunity to sharpen their fact-checking skills and guard against spreading misinformation and disinformation.
Mr Olorunyomi also advised the participants not to allow themselves to be used as agents of spreading misinformation and disinformation.
Mr Akintunde Babatunde, the Programme Director of CJID, explained that the fellowship started in 2019 with five fellows but had since churned out many fact-checkers through the fellowship over the past five years.
Aside from fact-checking training through the fellowship, the DUBAWA project also trained journalists and media practitioners in Nigeria and some West African countries including Ghana to introduce them to the business of fact-checking and information verification.
Experienced fact-checkers and researchers took the participants through series of presentations during the four-day training.
Mr Idris Akinbajo, the Managing Editor of the Premium Times in Nigeria, who took the participants through “Accountability journalism and the role of the media in West Africa”, explained that West African journalists ought to be concerned about the unstable democracy in the sub-region.
“Journalism and democracy have a symbiotic relationship”, he observed, and stated that independent and good journalism could only thrive in an environment of democratic and good governance and vice versa.
Other areas the participants were trained on included: “Understanding the Information Disorder Ecosystem”; “Media and Information Literacy (MIL) as a response to information disorder”; “Fact-checking: Practice and Methodology”; “Claim Discovery”; and “Google Fact-checking Tools” among others.
Some local language media practitioners and journalists also participated in the training while the Kwame Karikari Fact-Checking Fellowship proper was expected to commence in March, 2024.