Fortifying Community Truth: WITNESS Strengthens Local Journalism in East Africa
In early October, WITNESS held the Fortifying Community Truth (FCT) project in Nairobi, Kenya, a three-day workshop that brought together 12 investigative journalists from Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Somalia, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The gathering aimed to strengthen participants’ capacity to document, verify, and preserve audiovisual evidence in ways that defend their communities’ truths against denial and disinformation.
The FCT initiative seeks to build the resilience of underrepresented communities by equipping local journalists and human rights defenders with the tools and skills to verify, analyze, and archive evidence that reflects their lived realities. The workshop in Nairobi offered an intensive, hands-on introduction to new video-based strategies, including geospatial analysis, data wrangling, open-source verification, and archiving. The goal was simple yet vital: to strengthen participants’ ability to source, gather, catalog, verify, and securely store evidence so it cannot be easily dismissed or denied.
Selected from a pool of more than 50 applicants, each cohort member stood out for the clarity, creativity, and community focus of their project ideas. Their work tackles some of the region’s most pressing issues:
- Environmental injustice – from irresponsible mining to urban pollution
- State violence and gender-based violence, particularly around water bodies such as Lake Victoria
- Armed conflict and the disinformation that fuels instability
- And the integrity of information during electoral processes
Each project reflects the shared vision of the FCT project: to equip and empower communities to tell their own stories, verify their own truths, and shape narratives that lead to justice and accountability.
The launch of the FCT in East Africa comes at a critical moment for the region, which is entering a new wave of elections beginning with Tanzania in 2025, followed by Uganda, and later Kenya. At the same time, East Africa has witnessed a surge of youth-led demonstrations, popularly known as the Gen Z protests, marked by violent policing, government denials, and an overwhelming flood of citizen-generated visual documentation.
The FCT Project
First introduced in 2024, in West and Central Africa, the FCT Project builds on this same mission, defending community truths and challenging efforts to discredit or erase crucial audiovisual evidence. At its core, the initiative challenges the subtle but persistent sidelining of community and local journalists whose lived experiences and proximity to events offer depth and authenticity often overlooked in favor of “outside experts.”
Through this work, WITNESS aims to reclaim and reinforce the authority of community-based journalists, equipping them with open-source verification tools and audiovisual techniques they need to fortify truth within their own contexts. By making these skills accessible to practitioners across the Global Majority, the project advances a more inclusive, credible, and just information ecosystem, one where local voices are recognized as essential to shaping truth and accountability.
The model of the Fortifying Community Truth project is simple yet powerful. It begins by identifying a diverse and dynamic group of community changemakers — individuals deeply rooted in their contexts and driven to spark meaningful change. We invest in them by providing training on critical skills in open-source visual verification, archiving, and storytelling, and by connecting them with expert advisors from across Africa and beyond. Together, they design and implement projects that can impact thousands within their communities, strengthening local capacity to document, verify, and defend the truth.
As one of the cohort, Derrick Wandera from Uganda puts it, “The training deepened my understanding of how open source intelligence can be used to verify human rights violations in real time. It has equipped me with the skills to tell stories that are both credible and community-centered especially in environments where truth is often contested”
From start to finish, the emphasis was on practical learning and experimentation, creating an environment where participants could question, test, and refine ideas together. The result was a shared understanding of what it means to build verification methods that complement traditional investigative practices, ensuring they are fit for purpose and grounded in the realities of community practitioners.
In today’s overwhelming audiovisual landscape, where anything can be fabricated and authentic investigative reports can just as easily be dismissed, investigative journalists across Africa and other parts of the Global Majority can no longer afford to be left behind.
The courageous work these journalists do on the frontlines of truth-telling must be defended and strengthened by the practitioners themselves. At WITNESS, real protection lies in equipping them with the tools and skills to verify, analyse, archive, and present audiovisual evidence in ways that serve their pursuit of justice and accountability.
As another participant, Seliphar Musungu from Kenya reflected, “As the methods took hold, the language shifted from ‘I think’ and ‘allegedly’ to ‘the evidence shows.” This transformation from uncertainty to confidence, from doubt to proof, is at the heart of what it means to fortify the truth.
The Nairobi workshop marks the beginning of a year-long journey of support for the FCT East Africa cohort. Over the next twelve months, participants will continue to receive resilience support, including advanced training in project management, impact reporting, monitoring, evaluation, and learning (MEL), legal awareness, digital security, physical safety, trauma resilience, and AI detection.
WITNESS is not doing this work alone. We’re collaborating with expert advisors across the continent who will serve as mentors, guiding the cohort in the design and implementation of their projects. In addition, we’ll engage peer partners to offer technical support as projects take shape.
For instance, during the West and Central Africa phase, the Global Justice Investigations Lab at the University of Utrecht supported two cohort members with geolocation and project presentation, a model we plan to build upon in this new phase.
This work continues to remind us that when trust in the media is under attack, truth must find new defenses. We are excited about the future of journalism in Africa, as this budding network of Investigative journalists, working with limited resources, is pioneering community-rooted strategies and filling critical blind spots that global institutions too often overlook.
We are deeply grateful to our partners whose unwavering support makes this journey possible. And as we move forward, this also serves as an open invitation to organizations and allies who share our vision to join us in fortifying community truth and shaping a more just and accountable information landscape.
The FCT Pilot project
The FCT Pilot project in West and Central Africa brought together 17 cohort members from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Senegal, Ghana, and Cameroon. Through training, mentorship, and peer exchange, they developed and implemented innovative, locally grounded projects. Collectively, they trained over 200 journalists, researchers, and activists, and created 15 initiatives—including two databases on state and mob violence, six university-based verification clubs, and multiple OSINT-driven investigative reports that exposed human rights abuses and, through media literacy campaigns, reached an estimated 5 million people across traditional and digital media. Click here for more information.