Africa Check and the European Union equip Kenya’s media, researchers, diplomats, civil society and public officials to detect and counter foreign information manipulation

Africa Check and the European Union's diplomatic service have concluded an intense four-day programme of workshops, roundtables and policy dialogues with more than 80 journalists, editors, researchers, diplomats, civil society and public officials on how to spot and counter foreign information manipulation and interference (FIMI) in Kenya’s information ecosystem. 

The programme focused on building resilience against covert, insidious, and coordinated campaigns or initiatives meant to pollute the information ecosystem and shape or influence the people of Kenya.

“This has been a blind spot for many of the players in the information ecosystem in Kenya. As a first step, we wanted to build situational awareness of what FIMI is and how it manifests, here in Kenya and across Africa.  And also to show the open-source tools to help these frontline players spot and counter such campaigns,” said Alphonce Shiundu, Africa Check’s country manager for Kenya. 

The European Union  Ambassador to Kenya, Henriette Geiger, said new technologies had opened new avenues in the geopolitical battles for hearts and minds, and African countries, including Kenya, needed to build resilience to protect information integrity. 

The ambassador said the EU had worked on a response to protect its institutions, member States, and society, and that because the FIMI challenge transcended borders, the response had to be global. 

“One thing is clear. There are global players with global campaigns, and to have everybody develop their own approach will not work. We need to join forces to look at these global trends strategically to be able to recognise and dismantle global campaigns,” Geiger said at a meeting with public officials. 

Sébastien Babaud, who heads the EU’s taskforce responsible for countering FIMI in Sub-Saharan Africa,  showed how foreign actors infiltrated information systems with manipulated narratives that then pollute public understanding of policies and key issues. 

“The EU diplomatic service has been working on FIMI in Africa for a few years now, and we have seen a vibrant community of actors working on this topic in Kenya. So we wanted to support them in promoting their work and initiatives locally, and to provide the space for all these actors to come together and discuss the challenges they see and the responses they can take together to address them,” Babaud said.

Africa Check designed and led the execution of the four-day programme, with its chief editor, Lee Mwiti; the head of Francophone Africa, Valdez Onanina; and Alphonce Shiundu, the country manager for Kenya, delivering strategic and operational briefings to all participants alongside a practical lab on using open-source tools. 

The top editors conducted an intensive, two-day hands-on workshop for journalists and civil society leaders, working through the practical craft of countering FIMI, including how to tell whether an image or video is genuine or even generated by artificial intelligence. They showed how to trace a claim back to its original source, map the coordinated networks that push falsehoods, and detect and counter a manipulated narrative without amplifying it. 

After the two-day workshop, Africa Check convened three separate sessions for senior Kenyan editors, European diplomats and senior officials of the Government of Kenya for a series of high-level round tables and a policy dialogue on how the country can build a lasting, home-grown defence against foreign information manipulation, with government, civil society and independent media each playing their part.