The project, made possible by a $2 million grant from Google’s philanthropic arm, Google.org, has already seen remarkable results. With the support of 7 dedicated technical Google.org Fellows who worked on a pro bono basis, Full Fact's AI technology has seen a 1000x increase in claim detection (i.e. identifying which claims are most important to fact-check) and helped scale their fact-checks to appear in 237 million search results in 2020. The technology, developed by Full Fact since 2015, will now be used in a Nigerian election for the first time, offering instant transcription services and real-time fact-checking during debates, speeches and throughout the election process to increase the speed and accuracy of information dissemination.
Nigeria has a competitive advantage to become the global talent factory in the technology sector, with the capacity to earn over $40 billion annually, according to Inuwa Kashifu Abdullahi, Director General, National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA). Abdullahi said there is currently a vacancy of about 4 million programmers globally and Nigeria, with its huge […]