African Fact-Checking Awards 2024 ($3,000 prize) – Opportunity Desk

Deadline: July 14, 2024

Applications for the African Fact-Checking Awards 2024 are now open. The African Fact-Checking Awards, the longest-running awards programme honouring 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 honours 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 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 organisations or members of the media, for instance?

Application

Entries close at midnight GMT on July 14, 2024. Late applications will not be considered.

Click here to apply

For more information, visit African Fact-Checking Awards.