FUTURE FORWARD: Fighting fake news with AI — how west Africa’s Dubawa is transforming fact-checking

{JSON.stringify(article.attachments[0], null, 2)} --> Tools developed by a think-tank in west Africa are empowering local media and the public to distinguish between true and false information, especially as it relates to news on their own continent.

In their modest office in Abuja, Nigeria, Monsur Hussain and his team of software developers and AI researchers are debating ways to improve the next generation of fact-checking technology. Laptop screens flash with lines of code and machine-learning models while the group compares test results and revised algorithms, demonstrating how AI could better identify fact from fiction.

Hussain is head of innovation at the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID), a west African media innovation and development think-tank that uses investigative journalism, research and technology to improve journalism, promote accountability and combat misinformation across the region.

He led the development of Dubawa AI, a fact-checking tool launched in 2024 to help journalists and the public evaluate claims before they spread online.

The team began by focusing on one challenge: teaching AI to detect factual claims that needed to be verified.

“There’s a difference between questions and claims. What we want to focus on is claims,” Hussain says. “We started with training a model on understanding what claims are, especially claims that have an impact on society, like health-related claims, political claims and others.”

The Nigerian Communications Commission reports that Nigeria has more than 148 million active internet subscriptions, making it Africa’s largest online market. At the same time, advancements in generative AI have made modified photos, videos and audio more convincing, putting more pressure on journalists to check content before it is released.

For Abuja-based software engineer Japhet Johnson, locally developed AI models are increasingly important because they are trained using regional information that many global models overlook.

“Most of these AI models are trained maybe for Europe or the United States,” he says. “When we want to actually prove or get information, we find that most of those AI [models] might hallucinate. They might not be able to give you good information about Africa. That is where Nigeria needs to step in. We need AI that understands how our news is being presented.”

Johnson believes strengthening local data infrastructure will be critical if African AI systems are to remain reliable while complying with national data protection laws. “What we need to do now is ensure we have companies that follow the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation rules so that a lot of our data is stored internally.”

“If you go to dubawa.org, you will find the Let’s Factcheck! icon on the bottom right corner,” Hussain says.