CIA-Linked German Political Foundation KAS Partners Africa Check To Shape How African Journalists ‘Counter Misinformation’

The Konrad Adenauer Stiftung (KAS), a German state-funded political foundation with historical ties to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), has overtly partnered with Africa Check, a purportedly independent non-profit fact-checking organisation set up primarily with Western funding in 2012, to train African journalists on how to “counter misinformation” on the continent.

As examined by West Africa Weekly, the Global South Indaba presented the attempt to hijack and shape Africa’s information space by the CIA-linked German political foundation as a 2025 Fact-Checking Fellowship Programme – one that, according to Africa Check, encompasses a 12-day intensive training in Nairobi and designed to equip the unsuspecting African journalists with the skills, tools, and strategies to identify, verify, and counter misinformation.

The announced training, where interested African participants are required to provide their passports and employer details for potential fellowship grants, further indicates not only an attempt by KAS and the Africa Check to determine what constitutes misinformation or not, but also an attempt at exerting foreign intelligence interests and political influence under the guise of media development.

More questionably, KAS’s new fact-checking partner, Africa Check, has received funding from the Omidyar Network, a self-styled philanthropic investment firm that wields political influence by doling out huge donations to compliant corporate media, journalists, and fact-checking organisations and is linked to regime change operations, the Gates Foundation, and the George Soros-backed Open Society Foundation for South Africa (OSF-SA), which parent foundation, the Open Society Foundations, is a colour revolution outfit that carries out regime change operations alongside the CIA in targeted Global South countries of interests to clandestine players in Washington, Brussels, Paris, and London.

Related Exposé: US Embassy in Uganda Runs Clandestine Foreign Interference Program Targeting East African Journalists

For context, in late May, West Africa Weekly exposed a similar clandestine programme by the US Embassy in Uganda targeting East African journalists in Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference (FIMI) activities that focus on countering what it terms as “Russian propaganda and disinformation.”

In light of exerting such a level of foreign interference by funding African journalists’ training on misinformation, the partnership between KAS and Africa Check reflects external influence over Africa’s information space and effectively erodes independent journalism.

KAS and Africa Check, on the other hand, have set October 10 as their deadline for African journalists to apply for the fellowship, which is supposedly designed to train them in countering misinformation on the African continent, all while the critical question of who benefits remains obvious.

About The Author

Mayowa Durosinmi

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M. Durosinmi is a West Africa Weekly investigative reporter covering Politics, Human Rights, Health, and Security in West Africa and the Sahel Region

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