FactCheck Africa’s AI-driven fact-checking platform, MyAIFactChecker, has officially partnered with Meta through its Language Technology Partner Program, aiming to enhance efforts against misinformation and improve access to reliable information across Africa.
Founder of FactCheck Africa, Mr. Abideen Olasupo, announced the development over the weekend in Ilorin, describing the partnership as a “milestone moment” for the organisation.
Olasupo explained that Meta’s Language Technology Partner Program supports organisations working to develop language tools that aid content moderation, fact-checking, and access to credible information, particularly in underserved and low-resource languages.
He noted that the collaboration would help accelerate the development of AI-powered translation and speech recognition systems, vital for navigating Africa’s diverse linguistic landscape.
“In a continent as rich and diverse in language as Africa, technology must rise to meet the scale and complexity of our communication landscape,” Olasupo said. “This collaboration with Meta allows us to build and refine the tools that will help us do just that.”
Under the partnership, MyAIFactChecker will contribute key linguistic resources to Meta’s open-source initiatives, including over 10 hours of speech recordings, large corpora of written texts, and translated sentence sets. These resources are intended to train more accurate and inclusive language models that reflect Africa’s unique linguistic realities.
Olasupo emphasized that the initiative goes beyond combating misinformation, aiming to empower Africans with critical media literacy skills and the ability to distinguish fact from fiction in the digital age.
He added that MyAIFactChecker’s acceptance into the program reaffirms its leadership in using innovation to drive positive change, making reliable information more accessible to Africans in the languages they understand best.
Nzubechukwu Eze.
