The African Fact-Checking Awards, the longest-running awards program honoring fact-checking journalism by the media in Africa, are in their eleventh year. Entries for the 2024 awards are now open to journalists, journalism students, and professional fact-checkers – across the continent.
The awards have three categories, with honors 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
Prizes
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.
Eligibility
To be eligible, entries for this competition must:
Be the original work of the individual or team identified in the entry form as the author.
Expose a claim on an important topic that originated in or is relevant to Africa as misleading or wrong.
Be an original piece of fact-checking journalism first published or broadcast on any date from 1 July 2023 to 14 July 2024.
Judging Criteria
Entries are judged based on the following criteria:
Significance: The significance for a 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 organizations or members of the media, for instance?
