Fact-Checking in Ethiopia

It was a productive week here in Addis Ababa and pleasure is all mine today December 20, 2019, that I have completed a week-long Human Centred Design workshop for journalists, developers, and fact-checkers organised by Deutsche Welle Akademie (DW Akademie) in collaboration with Iceaddis.

Deutsche Welle Akademie (DW Akademie) in collaboration with iceaddis is implementing a media development project that focuses on the current situation on misinformation and disinformation in Ethiopia. The outcome of this human-centered design (HCD) workshop was to develop solutions/tools for fact-checking that could be used in Ethiopia to mitigate the adverse impacts of Misinformation and Disinformation.

Terminology
Misinformation and disinformation are often conflated with “fake news”. Whereas disinformation is understood as false information deliberately created to harm a person, social group, organization, or country, misinformation is not created with the intention of causing harm.

Who was this workshop for?
Anyone interested in Fact-Checking particularly interested to work with media experts, students, technologists, designers, and professionals from civic society organizations.

What I got out of this Workshop?
I got a chance to co-create solutions to mitigate the adverse impacts of misinformation and disinformation in Ethiopia. I also get a chance to work on Fact-Checking tools, methods, and solutions and Received a Certificate for my active participation. In a meantime in this workshop get connected with a lot of professionals from Media to Coders to Journalists, Academicians, fact Checkers, Experts, Writers, Students, Researchers who were from my Country Ethiopia, and other countries like; Kenya and Europe.

What I have learned from The Workshop.
It is like that I can breathe the fresh air of Fact-checking for the first time in general. I came to know that fact-checking is a sector that is very helpful for a country that misinformation and disinformation giving a hard time like Ethiopia.