AFRICAN TECH & MEDIA
The Lagos-based fact-checker just published its annual report. The figures inside tell a story that goes far beyond one organisation’s performance.
When a fact-checking organisation publishes its annual report, the instinct is to read it as a self-assessment. Outputs. Activities. Reach. But FactCheckAfrica’s 2025 Annual Impact Report is something more useful than that, it is an accidental diagnostic of how severe, how fast-moving, and how structurally underserved Africa’s misinformation problem has become. Here are seven numbers that tell that story.
1. 25,000+ Verification queries processed in a single year
FactCheckAfrica’s AI-powered tool, MyAIFactChecker, processed over 25,000 verification queries in 2025, up from 19,241 in 2024. That is not a metric about a tool. It is a measure of demand: tens of thousands of citizens actively seeking to know whether something they saw, heard, or received on WhatsApp was true. The gap between the volume of unverified content circulating across Nigerian and West African networks and the capacity of formal institutions to address it is enormous. This number is the bottom of that iceberg.
2. 150,000+ Citizens reached across six geopolitical zones
Nigeria has a population of over 220 million. FCA’s grassroots sensitisation effort reached more than 150,000 citizens across the country’s six geopolitical zones, a meaningful number for a non-profit operating on grant funding, but also a signal of how much ground remains uncovered. The organisation explicitly designed its outreach for inclusion: senior citizens, women’s groups, religious organisations, and persons with disabilities were all targeted. The implication is that standard digital-first outreach misses the communities most vulnerable to misinformation.
3. 1 New product built specifically for WhatsApp
The single most consequential launch of 2025 was not an app or a platform. It was a WhatsApp chatbot — and the reasoning behind that choice is the real story. WhatsApp is where misinformation is born, shared, and believed across Nigeria and West Africa. End-to-end encryption makes it nearly impossible to trace false claims after the fact. FCA’s response was to stop building tools that exist alongside that ecosystem and start building inside it. The chatbot works in low-bandwidth conditions, supports voice-to-text for users who cannot read or type, and operates in multiple languages. One product. One deliberate strategic decision. Significant implications for how African civic-tech organisations think about access.
4. 36+ Schools reached by a fact-checking card game
The Fact-Check Champs initiative is a 30-card flashcard game covering fact-checking terminology, how to spot fabricated content, and the mechanics of how misinformation spreads. Since its launch in January 2025, it has been deployed in over 36 schools across states including Lagos, Oyo, Borno, Sokoto, and Jigawa. This is worth pausing on: the organisation recognised that the most durable defence against misinformation is not a faster debunking tool — it is a generation that was taught to question before they believed. That is a twenty-year bet, and someone is making it.
5. 217 Publications produced in one year
FCA published 217 fact-checks, analyses, and reports in 2025, up from 201 in 2024. Thematic coverage included AI-generated disinformation, election integrity, health misinformation, and cross-border political narratives. For context, this output came from a small non-profit headquartered in Osogbo. The volume is notable, but the thematic range is what matters: misinformation in Africa does not respect neat category lines. A false health claim circulates alongside a fabricated electoral screenshot alongside a manipulated climate data post. Any institution serious about the problem has to track all of it.
6. 1000+ Citizens who self-verified during a live election in Cameroon
During the Cameroon 2025 presidential election, thousands of citizens submitted claims to MyAIFactChecker — deployed in both English and French — receiving near-real-time analysis cross-referenced against verified databases and official electoral commission updates. Fabricated screenshots, manipulated video footage, and AI-generated audio clips had circulated on WhatsApp and X within hours of their creation. For citizens with no access to trained fact-checkers, FCA’s tool was the only available means of self-verification. A Nigerian organisation, operating a bilingual AI tool, providing electoral integrity infrastructure in a neighbouring country. That is a sentence worth sitting with.
7. The ‘Liar’s Dividend’, A threat with no number attached
Not every critical data point comes with a figure. FCA’s 2025 report flags the emergence of what analysts are calling the ‘Liar’s Dividend’: the existence of convincing deepfakes has given bad actors a new defence, the ability to dismiss genuine evidence as AI-generated. This is arguably the most dangerous development in the misinformation landscape, not because of what it fabricates, but because of what it allows people to deny. It poisons the evidentiary environment. FCA’s editorial and verification work explicitly addresses this dynamic, but no single tool or organisation can resolve it alone. That is the honest conclusion this report leads to.
FactCheckAfrica’s 2025 Annual Impact Report is available at factcheckafrica.net. The organisation is headquartered in Osogbo, Nigeria, and is a verified signatory of the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN) Code of Principles.
