Africa Check was founded on 26 June 2012 as Africa’s first non-partisan fact-checking organisation, set up to promote honesty in public debate and the media across the continent. Its main office is in South Africa hosted by Wits Journalism. It also has offices in the UK, Senegal, Nigeria and Kenya.
It works to promote accuracy in public debate and the media in Africa and thereby raise the quality of information available to the public across the continent.
To do this, Africa Check in October 2012 launched the continent’s first non-partisan fact-checking website – https://africacheck.org/ – to check the accuracy of claims made in public debate and the media. In 2015 we registered as an independent trust in South Africa. Later that year we launched a French-language version of our site http://fr.africacheck.org/ in Senegal. And at the end of 2016 we set up offices in Nigeria and Kenya, bringing to four the number of countries we operate in.
As well as publishing hundreds of reports on our website, Africa Check takes part in fact-checking radio & television programmes in South Africa, Senegal, Nigeria and Kenya.
To bring real change across the continent, however, we need to do more than correct misleading claims ourselves. For this reason, we work to foster and support the practice of non-partisan fact-checking by others. To do this we operate training programmes for professional and student journalists, provide fact-checking tools for journalists and others and are launching an educational programme for the young in 2018. In 2014, we launched the African Fact-Checking Awards.
Our funding partners include the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Millennium Trust, the Omidyar Network, OSF-SA, OSIWA, the Shuttleworth Foundation and the Social Justice Initiative. In addition to donor funding, we also earn revenue to support the organisation, providing training and research services through our commercial unit, TRI Facts.
