AFCN 2nd Regional Meeting in 2024: Sharing Resources between the Community
June 13, 2024
The Arab Fact-checkers Network (AFCN) led by ARIJ continues to find solutions to the challenges facing its community and strengthen various means of cooperation. In its 2nd regional meeting in 2024, entitled “Sharing resources between fact-checking Organisations/Initiatives,” the meeting concluded by opening channels of cooperation between fact-checking organisations/initiatives, and a set of recommendations for future meetings.
During the meeting, that exceeded two hours, and was moderated by media and organisational expert Hassan Shaaban, and was attended by 22 fact-checkers from 14 fact-checking organisations/initiatives and 6 freelance fact-checkers from 10 Arab countries, AFCN manager Saja Mortada, started the discussion by asking about the most important challenges were facing the fact-checkers and and how they solved it during the past three months, exercising the principle of sharing experiences and expertise among the network community.
As part of the meeting’s agenda, Jehad Oumer, the executive director of “Annir” a Libyan initiative specialises in fact-checking and digital security, gave a presentation that envisioned how resources could be shared between fact-checking organisations/initiatives.
The participants were then given a questionnaire of the most important resources and services that their organisations/initiatives can provide, which were later presented so that each organisation/initiative chose the services it needed, to be linked and communicated together later to provide this support in a free and cooperative manner.
AFCN seeks to increase cooperation and create solid communication channels between fact-checking organisations/initiatives within the network community, after successful experiences of international and regional cooperation via the AFCN channel on Slack platform, to combat information disorder related to the war on Gaza.
Farhat Khader from Syria, editor-in-chief of the “Fareq” platform, expressed about attending his first regional meeting after their platform partnership with AFCN recently and said “The meeting is important and the presence of a representative from each fact-checking organisation/initiative is very necessary.” He also described the topic of the meeting of sharing resources between organisations/initiatives as “extremely useful and provides continuity to initiatives that lack such expertise.”
Hossam Al-Wakeel from Egypt, editor-in-chief of “Tafnied” platform, also added, “The idea of cooperation that was discussed at this meeting is very good. We at Tafnied are ready to continue providing support to all colleagues continuously in any field.”
It is worth noting that this is the 2nd meeting organised by AFCN for the year 2024, as the first meeting discussed “how to improve the quality of fact-checking reports and make them more impactful” as part of a series of regional meetings that AFCN began in 2022, on the path of creating a Strong Arab fact-checking community .
