Meet the woman making fact-checking accessible to Deaf people in Nigeria
Zainab Sanni on Facts Inclusive; media recommendations; a resource and an event
Welcome, new members! I’m Priti Salian, the creator of this fortnightly newsletter. All of you who have been long-time subscribers, thank you for writing with your thoughts about the last issue with Tanzila Khan. I appreciate it!
Last year, when the blind Indian sprinter Simran Sharma was set to compete in the Paralympics, I was curious to see how the media covered her sport. Did anyone try to find out how blind athletes run with their sighted partners? Do they hold hands or use a tether? How different are the rules for blind athletes? Do the partners get awarded too?
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Today’s interview will take you to Nigeria where gender and social inclusion advocate and multimedia journalist Zainab Sanni is working to make fact-checking inclusive for Deaf people. As the co-founder of News Verifier Africa, she spearheads Facts Inclusive where she first created an animated character, Kudi, who in sign language indicates on every fact-checked video whether the information it provides is true, false or misleading. Recently, Facts Inclusive created a fact-checking course in sign language.
Zainab talks to Reframing Disability about her work and its impact.
Zainab Sanni runs News Verifier Africa in Nigeria.
“We test the solution, we refine it”
How did the idea of the Facts Inclusive initiative come to you?
When I was a teenager, my mom fell sick, and she was subject to all kinds of misinformation. She would spend huge amounts of money based on what she had read online or what somebody had told her. Most of the time that information was false, so lots of her money went into trick things that had no scientific basis. It was an experience that stayed with me. When I grew up to be a journalist, I understood that it was misinformation.
During COVID-19 again I noticed that people in my community were responding to wrong information they got from social media. That’s when with a friend of mine, I decided to start a Facebook page which eventually became News Verifier Africa and we started to work on fighting information disorders. I’ve always been someone sensitive to social injustice, maybe because I grew up as the only girl among my siblings and was very aware, pretty early, of the differences between us. So, I was always sensitive to someone not being treated right because of their vulnerability.
When we started News Verifier Africa, I was very particularly interested in receiving feedback from friends. One of my close friends who is deaf, told me, “You are doing such an amazing project, but what's your plan for people like me?” That got me thinking that there are people who cannot hear, people who cannot see, and they're also vulnerable to mis- and dis- information. I did my research to see if anybody was doing such a project, what the environment was in Nigeria, and I realised that in the whole of Nigeria, where we have 740 broadcast channels, only one has sign language interpretation. That made me so angry.
Deaf people also come online and read all the wrong information, and there's no way to go back to them and say that this is wrong. And we know that false information travels faster than the truth. So what’s the likelihood that they will get factual information? Understanding that problem, we pitched for the Facts Inclusive initiative with the International Center for Journalists in 2022.
For this proposal, my co-founder Olakunle Mohammed and I did some design thinking, brainstormed, and interacted with the community and with the Abuja Deaf Association. I also worked with an association of the blind run by my friend Comfort Ekwo.
We initially planned to have an animated character that could automatically translate everything that we fact-check for our audiences into sign language. But then we realized how difficult and financially intensive that would be as there was still ongoing research in that area. So we decided to focus on a character that could do only the “verdict”, saying whether a piece of news is true, false, or misleading. And so we designed the animated character, Kudi (a common Nigerian name for girls). We pitched it to ICFJ and got the funding.
When we tested Kudi with the community, we got feedback that it wasn’t enough. We were told that while the character is signing, and the rest of the information is in English captions, there are still people who cannot read English, who do not understand what’s in the text. We still need full-scale sign language content, but we did not have the money to begin to develop the character or to translate all the material we were working on into sign language videos.
We then decided to empower people in the community to have media literacy skills and understand the basics of fact-checking, encourage them to take a verification course and maybe the community can then even begin to own the process, because me and my co-founder don’t have the lived experience of deafness. So our focus right now is on how we can ensure that people within the community own that process and we are not leading an advocacy from outside. That's why we created a basic 15-minute fact-checking course in sign language.
How do you plan to move forward with the course?
Right now we are just focusing on ensuring that as many people as possible can access the course so that even without funding, we can continue to reach the communities that we are working with. But in the interim, we are trying to raise funding to be able to use it to train larger groups of sign language educators or interpreters and deaf educators, and take it to schools around Africa and the world, and teach them media literacy skills. We are also hoping that we can get interest from universities and associations.
In the long term, we want to develop the course beyond its basic form and actively train people within the disability community who want to learn media literacy skills, become fact-checkers and fact-checking trainers.
The idea is to bridge that gap of information that exists between the deaf and hearing persons. I want that deaf people should also feel included, become more interested in media literacy so they are not vulnerable to mis- and disinformation.
We don’t say what we have is the solution. We test the solution, we refine it. Even with the course, we have collected everyone’s emails and three months on, we want to check their experience taking this course and ask what we could do differently. We are just testing approaches on the basis that we need more inclusion, we need more accessibility in the fact-checking sector and ecosystem.
What has the feedback on the course been so far?
Over 1,000 people have taken the course in just over a month. I thought that it would take us about three months to get a thousand people because we are reaching out to the associations ourselves to ask them to encourage people in their community to take the course. But, the interest has been eye-opening and has validated our hypotheses that persons in this community have trust in media literacy. They want to learn but we in the fact-checking community are just not trying to think or we are not accessible enough for them to be involved in what we are doing or to engage with our content.
Any responses that you would like to share?
One person said that it was the most awesome thing he had seen on the Internet because not many courses are made in sign language.
The president of the Abuja Deaf Association wrote that he is very grateful for the course because there are not many occasions when people think about doing something that is specifically for the non-hearing community. It always comes to them as an afterthought.
Another lady who is disabled stumbled on it on social media and wants to partner with us to train people in her community.
These responses showed us that the work we are doing does have some basis and validation by the community.
Any other impact that you think the course has made?
In the next month, we want to track just how many people are taking action based on what they have learned from this course. I'm not really after the big numbers or stories of thousands of people. Even if only one person can understand that there is misinformation and can do something about it, that would be a win for us. And I would say the most significant impact we have had is people telling us that this course has been very helpful for them and they learned something significant from it.
What do you need to grow Facts Inclusive?
If we had the money we would research and create a character that can create content by itself in sign language based on the text provided. That should be the ideal. But we also think that funding cannot only come in the form of money. We would be open to partnerships, people working with us to develop the course further and collaborations with educational associations. But improved reach would be a win for us in itself. And I think that one of the challenges that we've also had is that when we started, there was no d/Deaf person on our team. But we've been able to remedify that by having an advisor who is a Deaf leader in Nigeria. We have a sign language interpreter in our team and we just started to put together our board of advisors and we are ensuring that we have at least one person who is Deaf. So we are taking active steps towards inclusivity so that we can shape the work we do and we ensure that we are not just giving an outside perspective or imposing solutions on the community.
To make us sustainable in the long term, we are also creating products such as a tracker for climate mis- and disinformation and a fact-checking application.
Resource
Ever seen icons for “disability pride” and “adaptive clothing”? Explore these 25 free icons dedicated to accessibility and inclusive design, created by the Noun Project in partnership with Disability:IN, School of Visual Arts, and Canva and find some gems you could start using right away.
Event
If you read Jason Strother’s interview in a recent issue of Reframing Disability, you might want to register and watch the virtual screening of his film Invisible Impact on March 4 at 6 PM Eastern time.
Recommendations
Read
Both Zainab and I recommend Jack McElaney’s newsletter where he curates links to Accessibility In The News.
In this Huck magazine interview, Amber Galloway –the sign language interpreter who is changing the way we listen to music – talks about her process of interpreting music:
“When I’m interpreting, I’ll put my piano on my right side, the snare drum higher up on the left side. I put my bass or my kick drum in front of my stomach area and I’ll refer back and forth to where I’ve set these instruments up. So that they all exist and their voices live.”
Listen
Zainab recommends the Africa Rights Talk - Centre for Human Rights podcast. Hosted by Victoria Amaechi, the series explores human rights through conversations with academics, practitioners and activists and offers insight into the African human rights system and the state of human rights in Africa, and globally.
Watch
And of course, you must watch this fact-checking course created by News Verifier Africa, to understand what Zainab is doing and collaborate with her if you want to replicate it.
This TEDx talk by Grade 12 student Ved Chikarmane, which his mom, Deepa Chikarmane, a reader of Reader Disability lovingly shared with me along with this note:
Ved was diagnosed with bilateral sensory neural hearing loss late and received therapy at the age of 4. From a young age, he has taken on advocating for awareness of early detection of hearing loss. He has managed to rally the government of Karnataka to pass a directive to make detection at birth mandatory. Since then he has become the Ambassador for the National Program for the Prevention and Control of Deafness. He is the founder of the Kivvy project, which is a platform that helps connect the dots and hopes to be a one-stop point for information and resources for all hearing loss people. He has been obsessed with making early detection of hearing loss a reality given the prohibitive cost of OAE equipment. With all the experiences he has had dealing with hearing loss and his living experiences, he is eager to pay it forward.
That’s it for today. Keep writing with your thoughts. It keeps me motivated to work on this newsletter, and I always write back! Find me on LinkedIn and Instagram if we’re not connected already!
Until next time.
Warmly,
Priti