Blog: Celebrating A Timely Partnership In Advancing the Heights of Fact-Checking
If you’ve ever advanced complex, unique ideas, you know that doing it alone can be incredibly challenging. Your objectives might remain unfulfilled, and the journey is often less than thrilling.
At Debunk Media Initiative, we greatly value collaboration with like-minded entities. Over the past five months, our team of fact-checkers has completed a fruitful partnership and mentorship with PesaCheck, an initiative by Code for Africa aimed at countering disinformation.
This partnership has been a tremendous learning experience, allowing our team to develop new skills in fact-checking false information and fake news in Uganda and across the African continent.
The collaboration began with weekly in-depth online training sessions that included several other fact-checking startups and organisations from across Africa. Our organisation was primarily represented by four members: three fact-checkers and one editor. We appreciated both the content and the timing of these sessions.
During the partnership, we produced 14 fact-checks over several months. The collaboration included content syndication to both our audiences, mentorship sessions, and constructive editorial feedback, all of which have strengthened our fact-checking desk.
According to Edgar Mathew Karuhanga, one of the fact-checkers and head of training at Debunk Media Initiative, we have been fact-checking for a while now and still, the project partnership was a great learning experience for an individual and organisation as a whole.
“Starting from the training we received before applying the project to the implementation process, I learned how to impactfully and creatively fact-check false information, which is evident through the work we published. Illustrated data presented in our fact-checks, and the various steps followed during the fact-checking process,” he explains.
We were also mentored by Naomi Wanjiku from Code for Africa. Throughout the mentorship, we were guided, received feedback, and revisited some areas that Naomi needed further clarification on. Our research knowledge has improved.
We celebrate revisiting how to identify a claim that’s worthy of fact-checking, using advanced tools like forensic analysis tools, using Street View tools, among others.
Additionally, we encountered some challenges during the five months. Elizabeth Namajja, who is also a fact-checker at Debunk Media Initiative, says she occasionally found it difficult to fact-check some misinformation and disinformation as some of the claims she encountered didn’t have enough conclusive evidence to counter them effectively.
To bypass such challenges, the team, with the aid of Naomi and the debunk internal editor Rukia Nabbanja, diversified the claim identification process and scaled it to focus on geopolitical and current affairs claims, which are relatively easy to debunk in real-time.
According to Reagan Kiyimba, a fact-checker at the Debunk Media Initiative, the flow of claims was swift since we had two editorial teams: PesaCheck’s Naomi Wanjiku and our internal editor Rukia Nabbanja. This saw us debunk diverse claims from various fields of study and localities ranging from Uganda to Kenya, Tanzania, and Africa at large. It also ushered in a new mode of fact-checking.
“I was used to writing my draft with just claims and evidence alone, but I now know that it’s not only about giving people facts but also how the facts are presented. This created a great depth of knowledge and experience which will help me throughout my fact-checking career,” added Reagan.
As with all good things, this partnership has come to an end, but we see it as the beginning of more and longer collaborations with Code for Africa and PesaCheck. With all the support and mentorship we’ve received, we have reached new heights in advanced fact-checking, which gives us the confidence to continue countering disinformation for the betterment of African lives and communities.
One Good Turn Deserves Another.