Taiwo Adebulu has emerged winner of the Fact-Check of the Year by a Working Journalist at the 2020 African Fact-Checking Awards.
Mr. Taiwo Adebulu, a reporter with The Cable, won the award for his piece; ‘FACT CHECK: Nigeria told UN that 7 varsities run strictly on renewable energy, but is this true?’
In his fact-check, Taiwo Adebulu investigated how Nigeria’s minister of environment had grossly misinformed the United Nations at its Climate Action Summit in 2019.
Taiwo Adebulu, who holds a master’s degree in communication arts from the University of Ibadan, is also a recipient of the 2020 BudgIT/Civic Hive media fellowship.
The runner-up in the working journalist category was Aisha Abdool Karim of South Africa’s Bhekisisa Centre for Health Journalism for a report in which she found that the so-called Covid-19 “vaccine” that a South African mayor wanted to buy is not a vaccine but a drug that wasn’t proven to work against the coronavirus that causes Covid-19.
The winner of the category of Fact-Check of the Year by a Student Journalist was Marième Fatou Dramé from the CESTI journalism school in Senegal who did a report looking into claims about the financial costs and other impacts of menstruation on Senegalese women throughout their lifetimes. [Une organisation féministe publie des informations trompeuses sur les jeunes filles sénégalaises (absentéisme scolaire, gestion des règles)]
The runner-up was Oluwaseye Ogunsanya, a student of the Lagos State University in Nigeria, for a fact-check in which he found that a video claiming that Nigeria’s Minister of Education announced the resumption of schools on 7 September was doctored.
Announcing the winners of the 2020 fact-checking awards on October 22, 2020, Africa Check said it received 192 entries from 27 countries.
Africa Check is Africa’s first Independent fact-checking website and held its inaugural awards in 2014.
During the virtual awards ceremony on Thursday, Africa Check stated:
“In what has been a year like no other, we’ve received the highest number of entries in the history of the African Fact-Checking Awards: 192 entries from 27 countries across Africa.
We’ve gone from strength to strength since our inaugural awards in 2014, when we had about 40 entries from 10 countries. This growth can only be a wonderful advertisement for the growing & vibrant practice of fact-checking on the continent.“
