The Youth Café seeks to equip young people with critical media literacy skills: critical thinking, fact-checking, online safety, social media verification, and quality assessment of online information and sources through a Digital Media and Information Literacy Handbook. Therefore, it is important to empower leading African actors to think through the collaborative steps they and their societies should take to combat disinformation.

In light of our work regarding disabling disinformation, The Youth Cafe has been invited by The Africa Center for Strategic Studies to attend a two-day workshop that aims to establish a community of counter-disinformation practitioners, researchers, and civil society stakeholders to examine the impacts of the manipulation of information systems in Africa for political ends and to develop a collaborative space to accelerate the incubation of effective African measures and capacity to mitigate disinformation.

Disinformation—the intentional dissemination of false or deceptive information for political purposes—is a rapidly developing threat to Africa’s information systems and the democratic societies they undergird. In recent years, external and domestic actors have launched dozens of carefully designed and coordinated disinformation campaigns across a variety of mediums to distort information ecosystems and warp public narratives—a trend that appears to be accelerating.

These disinformation campaigns have pumped millions of deliberately false and misleading posts into Africa’s online social media spaces. As currently managed and used, these spaces offer limited empowerment or protection for Africa’s internet users.

The Africa Center for Strategic Studies hopes to work with 25 leading African voices in analyzing, raising awareness, and strategizing against disinformation campaigns targeting African information systems. This will include fact-checkers, open-source researchers, investigative journalists, digital literacy educators, youth and civic engagement leaders, and communications experts.

This will be done by building a community of critical praxis where members can learn from one another’s experiences, share perspectives and insights into the continent’s changing information landscapes and the disinformation campaigns targeting them, compare best practices for research and awareness raising about disinformation, and brainstorm specific strategies for disarming disinformation in Africa.