West Africa’s verification and fact-checking platform, Dubawa, is set to launch a new country office in Sierra Leone.
The launch will take place on July 13, 2021 at the Country Lodge Hotel in Freetown.
A project of the Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism (PTCIJ with a core mandate to restore the eroding trust of newsrooms, Dubawa’s mission is to institute a culture of truth and verification in public discourse and journalism through strategic partnerships between the media, government, civil society organizations, technology giants and the public.
“We are super excited at this development, which is one element in the broad mission of Premium Times’ strategy to help deepen the primacy of ethics in governance, in policy making and in journalism within the ECOWAS subregion,” Executive Director of PTCIJ, Dapo Olorunyomi, said.
As part of activities for the official launch, Dubawa will also train journalists and bloggers in fact-checking skills, digitals tools, Right to Information laws and data journalism.
“We are setting up shop in Sierra Leone with the hopes of tackling misinformation and disinformation through rigorous fact-checking, media literacy and research,” Oluwasin Alagbe, Programme Director of PTCIJ also said.
Currently, Dubawa has been holding successful annual fellowships for journalists, fact checkers and researchers in The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone to equip fellows with skills in fact-checking and verification in combating the widespread regime of misinformation in the West African sub-region and to also contribute to knowledge around information disorder in the subregion.
First launched in Nigeria as the country’s first indigenous fact-checking platform in 2018, Dubawa expanded its programme to Ghana in 2019 and Sierra Leone in 2020 in a bid to promote accountability and democracy across the West African region. Dubawa currently also has a presence in Liberia and the Gambia.
