Hello and welcome to more or less on the BBC World Service. This week we talked to the

founder of the fact checking organisation AfricaCheck, Peter Conliffe Jones. He recently stood

down as its executive director and came to talk to us about what he's learnt about misinformation.

Peter says he first came up with an idea for a fact checking organisation while he was

working in Nigeria for the news agency AFP. It was a very exciting time to be a journalist

and to witness the transition to civilian rule. It was the late 90s and early 2000s,

military rule had just ended in the country. There was a vaccination campaign that was launched

to try to eradicate polio. This was in 2002. I saw claims being made that the campaign was not

an attempt to eradicate the disease but an attempt to reduce the world's Muslim population.

The claims were that there was an anti-fatility agent in the vaccine and that by giving women

the vaccine you reduce the population. The claims were completely unfounded but they were reported

as fact and they were picked up by a very prominent government in Carno in northern Nigeria

with a large Muslim population and he introduced a vaccine ban. Last year we went back to Nigeria

and interviewed some of the people who now today suffer from polio because of the vaccine ban

that was introduced. I'd seen the impact when I worked for AFP in Nigeria that misinformation

can have on people's real lives and I thought that something needed to be done to try to tackle

that problem. It took a few years but Peter eventually got the opportunity to launch a fact-checking

agency. Africa Check was born and started out in a small office in Johannesburg South Africa in 2012

with a four-person team. With some funding over the next seven years the team grew to 30.

We didn't want this to be only an Anglophone project and so we set up a very small team again

in Dacca in Senegal and then quite swiftly at the end of 2016, early 2017 in Lagos in Nigeria and

in Nairobi in Kenya. Their primary function is to take claims in the news or on social media that

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