Call for Nominations: African Fact-Checking Awards

To qualify, entries must have been first published or broadcast in the period from 1 May 2024 to 7 June 2025. The fact-check should conclude that a claim about an important topic, originating in or relevant to Africa, is either misleading or wrong.

Categories

• The awards have three categories, with honours going to a winner and a runner-up. The categories are:
  • Fact-Check of the Year by a Working Journalist
  • Fact-Check of the Year by a Professional Fact-Checker
  • Fact-Check of the Year by a Student Journalist

Award Information

• The winners of the working journalist and professional fact-checker categories will each get a prize of US$3,000.
• The runners-up will receive $1,500.
• The winner of the student journalist category will be awarded $2,000, and the runner-up $1,000.

Judging Criteria

• Significance
  • The significance for wider society of the claim/statement investigated. How much does the topic matter to society at large and how serious could the consequences be if the claim wasn’t fact-checked.
• Testing
  • How was the claim tested against the available evidence? Fact-checkers must take a long, hard look at the claim/statement that was made. Fact-checking entails rigorously sifting through the publicly available evidence for and against the claim. This should be done in a way that is fair to the person or institution who made the claim and strict in assessing the evidence.
• Presentation
  • How well does the piece present the evidence for and against the claim? A good fact-checking report is structured in such a way that it’s understandable and makes the topic accessible to the widest possible public.
• Impact
  • The impact that the fact-check had on public debate on the topic. Did it lead to a correction, did it have significant reach, or was it shared by other organisations or members of the media, for instance?

For more information, visit Africa Check.