As Malawi approaches 2025 General Elections, the Media Institute of Southern Africa (MISA) Malawi on Tuesday engaged Mchinji District Council executive committee on the dangers of misinformation and disinformation.
Under its i-Verify Malawi Project, MISA wants to build capacity of people, and even councils, to debunk false information they encounter.
MISA Vice Chairperson, Chisomo Ngulube, said the institute believes that everyone has to be equipped with fact-checking skills and must have the desire to fight false information at all levels of society.
“MISA Malawi is building the capacity of Malawians on how they can detect and expose information that is false or misleading. This interface is one of such activities.
“We have also developed an online platform called i-Verify that we will use to publish verified information before, during and after the 2025 elections,” said Ngulube.
Mchinji District Commissioner, Lucia Chidalengwa, commended MISA Malawi for the engagement saying it has come at an appropriate time as there is a lot of fake news flying around these days.
“The community that the Council serves usually gets information from secondary sources and it is usually distorted. It is, therefore, necessary to prepare them so that they should not always believe anything they are fed,” said Chidalengwa.
She added that as general elections are approaching, it is important for the Council and its stakeholders to be able to debunk unnecessary information.
i- Verify Malawi is a system which will be implemented by the Institute and is based on an online fact-checking tool.
The i-Verify Malawi project is funded by the United Nations Development program (UNDP) with support from the European Union (EU), Royal Norwegian Embassy, Ireland and UK International.