NAIROBI, Kenya Aug 10 – In their modest office in Abuja, Nigeria, Monsur Hussain and his team of software developers and AI researchers, are debating ways to better the next generation of fact-checking technology. Laptop screens flash lines of code and machine learning models while the group compares test results, revised algorithms, and demonstrated how artificial intelligence could better identify fact from fiction.

📻 Breaking It Down

Hussain is the innovation head at the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID), a West African media innovation and development think tank that employs 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.

“Basically, deciding what to build, how to build it, and what problem we are looking to solve, identifying the problem itself, and working along with journalists and fact checkers to ensure that the solution we’re envisioning is the right one,” he says.

📌 What You Need to Know

The name Dubawa is derived from Hausa, a language extensively spoken in northern Nigeria and areas of West Africa. While it literally means “look,” in the sense of fact-checking, it is most closely translated as “check” or “verify.”

The team began by focusing on one challenge: teaching artificial intelligence 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 (NCC) reports that Nigeria has over 148 million active internet subscriptions, making it Africa’s largest online market. At the same time, advancements in generative artificial intelligence have made modified photos, videos, and audio more convincing, putting more pressure on journalists to check content before release.

For Abuja based software engineer Japhet Johnson, locally developed artificial intelligence 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 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.”

📰 Source: Capital FM Kenya