Rewriting the Rules of Digital Verification: How African Investigative Journalists Are Building New Data Models

Investigative journalists across Africa, working with limited resources, are pioneering community-rooted strategies in geospatial analysis, data collection, and open-source verification, and in doing so, are filling critical blind spots that global institutions too often overlook.

The End Bad Governance protests of 2024 in Nigeria underscored the powerful role of citizen footage in shaping resistance. These protests were mobilized and sustained mainly through grassroots video documentation — ordinary citizens capturing extraordinary acts of bravery, defiance, and gross human rights violations by officials of the Nigerian police force. However, this visual evidence was fragile. Many of those who uploaded videos, fearing targeting or victimization, removed them. Others saw their content taken down by social media platforms, citing community standards.

To prevent this loss, journalists and researchers from the Human Rights Journalists Network (HRJN) are launching an initiative to preserve crucial footage in a secure database designed not just to archive but to support future accountability processes. In a climate where denial and disinformation flourish, preservation alone is not sufficient. The burden of proof on journalists is exceptionally high. Therefore, to be taken seriously, especially by institutions that tend to side with official narratives, every frame must be verifiable and credible.

Verification presented a new layer of difficulty. Open source tools like Google Maps and Google Earth, widely used for geolocation and context analysis, lacked current and detailed data even for Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja. But the team solved that problem through innovation. In the absence of updated Google Street View, they turned to drive-through videos captured by local residents to match streetscapes and landmarks. Where satellite imagery fell short, they sourced drone footage found on YouTube as a substitute. And when videos were shaky, blurred, or incomplete, they employed cross-linking methods, from their collection of hundreds of open source videos, connecting multiple visual images to piece together a fuller, verifiable picture of events.

The global nonprofit WITNESS seeks to strengthen online investigations and digital verification through free resources and databases. Image: Screenshot, WITNESS

Global Tools That Lack Local Knowledge

One of the biggest gaps in the verification landscape is the heavy dependence on tools-based methods that lack local knowledge. As demonstrated in the investigative report by Aliyu Dahiru, an investigative journalist with HumAngle, uncovering the full depth of a story requires both contextual knowledge and open source tools working together, especially in conflict zones where visuals are ambiguous, locations are intentionally obscured, and cultural references can be easily misinterpreted.

For instance, while monitoring online extremist activity, Dahiru found that jihadist groups used seemingly innocuous emojis to communicate coded messages — like a bomb emoji signaling an attack, or specific animals referencing targets. These meanings were not detectable through tools alone; they required deep immersion, pattern recognition, and cultural fluency. Without this kind of contextual grounding, investigators risk missing nuance, misinterpreting signals, or misidentifying threats entirely.

Similarly, institutionalized workflows miss contextual nuances that community-based verification catches. For example, a blurry video of mob violence without precise GPS coordinates might be dismissed by institutional teams. But as Opeyemi Lawal, an investigative journalist with the Foundation for Investigative Journalism in Nigeria, has demonstrated through her work on mob violence in Nigeria, being embedded in the community allows for verification through context that outsiders might miss.

For example, locals might recognize a hand-painted shop sign, hear a specific local dialect in the background, or identify the kind of response that usually follows market disputes in that town. Or as Lawal notes, they might be able to identify with precision a video of mob violence. These are details that do not show up on Google Street View or in metadata, but they’re evident to someone who understands the social and cultural landscape. This is where community-based verification becomes essential: it picks up the nuance that tools alone can’t capture.

Equally, the issue of epistemic exclusion is the subtle yet pervasive way the voices of community/local journalists are sidelined in favor of distant or foreign journalists who are deemed more objective or credible experts.  In practice, this means that investigative journalists from elite institutions or Global North-based organizations are often granted automatic authority, while community-based investigators — those closest to the events, the language, and the terrain — are too often relegated to just being sources rather than equal partners. This dynamic shows up in media citations practices, in who gets invited into training rooms, and in whose methodology is considered “rigorous.” The irony, of course, is that many of the breakthroughs in visual investigation, from identifying off-map locations to decoding local visual cues, depend entirely on contextual knowledge held by local practitioners. Yet their work is frequently validated only after it has been filtered through institutional pipelines.

Building a Community-Based Investigation System 

To address this disparity, WITNESS, a global nonprofit organization, launched the Fortifying Community Truth project, an initiative that centers the role and influence of community-based journalists in open source visual investigations, specifically in geospatial analysis, data collection, archiving, verification, and presentation skills, grounded in locally relevant strategies.

In 2024, WITNESS rolled out the pilot project in West and Central Africa with 17 cohort members of media practitioners from across five countries: Nigeria, Ghana, Senegal, Sierra Leone, and Cameroon. The cohort members gathered in Abuja in May 2024 to develop the basis for a community-based approach to open source verification that they would embark upon within their communities over the next year.

Journalists from West and Central Africa participating in WITNESS’ Fortifying Community Truth (FCT) project. Image: Courtesy of WITNESS

One of these cohort members was Kehinde Adegboyega, executive director of the Human Rights Journalists Network, whose End Bad Governance Archive, referenced earlier, seeks to preserve critical evidence of police brutality during the 2024 Nigerian protests, to support future accountability.

The database, which is still in development by HRJN, will serve as the most comprehensive collection of community-filmed documentation from the demonstrations, where thousands of Nigerians took to the street against rising prices and inflation but were met with severe repression, characterized by excessive use of tear gas, gunfire, and physical assaults. Thousands of these videos from the nationwide protests were uploaded every day to social media.

The database is being built from hundreds of videos and photos uploaded to X (formerly Twitter) by protesters during the August 2024 demonstrations. Dedicated teams have been assembled and trained to carry out each stage of the verification process.

“Social media, particularly X, plays a crucial role. It became both a real-time archive and a frontline reporting platform,” explains Peace Odekunle, a freelance journalist from Lagos, Nigeria, who was one of the open source collectors. “Protesters, observers, and concerned citizens used it to share videos, pictures, and firsthand accounts. Without it, a lot of what happened would have been lost or distorted.”

Drawbacks of Relying on Big Tech Platforms

The project also revealed the limitations of relying solely on social media to source content from the protests. While platforms like X were essential for surfacing real-time footage, inconsistent updates, deleted posts, and the lack of access to verified public records created significant gaps in the timeline.

Emily Loughrey, a student from the Global Justice Investigations Lab at the University of Utrecht, notes that the nature of the footage presented significant challenges.

“While reverse image search is a crucial tool for geolocation, it did not always help our work,” she says. “Much of the collected footage focused on violent incidents, so we were looking at scenes filled with smoke, police vehicles, and chaos. Buildings and background landmarks were often blurred, obstructed, or too distant to identify.”

This highlights an important truth: even with access to footage, verification becomes complex when the visual focus is on urgency and trauma rather than location-defining features.

Another significant obstacle to the Fortifying Community Truth initiative was the lack of sustainable, secure storage systems and limited access to essential software needed for the collection and verification of evidence. These gaps made it challenging to preserve visual documentation safely and verify it effectively, thereby slowing down investigations and increasing the risk of losing critical information.

For many frontline defenders and investigative journalists, uploading sensitive data to servers owned by tech giants is neither secure nor sustainable. These platforms, while widely accessible, often operate under opaque policies, centralized control, and geopolitical interests that may directly endanger those documenting human rights violations. In response, a growing movement is exploring community-owned, autonomous servers as a pathway to independence from tech hegemony.

University of Utrecht student team working with WITNESS and HRJN, (left to right): Judith Buuts, Alonso Cisneros Uribe, Emily Loughrey, and Sophia Eberhard Zolle. Image: Courtesy of WITNESS

Building an Alternative Verification Infrastructure

WITNESS, alongside partners in Latin America such as Laboratorio Popular de Medios Libres and Sutty, is actively advancing models that reject extractive and institutional digital practices in favor of decentralized, rights-based alternatives. One standout example is Escuela Común, which combines community media training with technical capacity building. Through its methodology, human rights defenders and grassroots journalists learn to utilize open source tools for documentation, archiving, and server management, thereby building secure and locally governed infrastructures.

It is these innovative community-based solutions that are providing security and sustainability for journalists working in at-risk environments in the global majority. They are not waiting for the perfect conditions; they are actively building new methodologies, adapting open source tools to local realities. These efforts must be matched with the requisite investment in skills, tools, infrastructure, and narrative power. The global community must turn its resources to these frontlines where the most innovative, vibrant, and under-recognized work in investigative journalism is happening.

Nkem Agunwa supports activists, advocates, and legal experts across Africa to leverage the power of video and technology to defend human rights. At the same time, working to elevate the role and influence of community-based human rights defenders and journalists to resist delegitimisation, assert truthful narratives and advance justice. She is the senior program manager for Africa at WITNESS.

Georgia Edwards is the program coordinator for evidence and investigations at WITNESS, supporting the documentation, verification, and presentation of audiovisual material to be used in community-led justice accountability processes.