MCI AI Media Lab
AI Literacy for East African Newsrooms
Training platform teaching journalists and journalism educators across Uganda and Kenya to use AI responsibly, with a working fact-checker that grades claims rather than just summarising them.
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Challenge
The Media Challenge Initiative needed to teach AI to journalism educators and students across Uganda and Kenya, in a region where AI-assisted disinformation is already circulating faster than newsrooms can check it. Generic AI courses do not address that, and a slide deck cannot show a reporter what a fabricated claim looks like when it is pulled apart.
Solution
A full learning platform built around practice rather than theory. Three modules mapped to the UNESCO AI Competency Framework for Teachers, and seven AI tools students actually run on real material: a fact-checker that scores credibility and marks each claim true or false, claim extraction, source finding, ethics and legal checks, translation, and writing feedback. Educators author their own courses, lessons and quizzes in the browser, and every completion issues a certificate with a QR code anyone can verify.
Impact
Fifty students and their educators across ten universities in Uganda and Kenya are working on it, and they have run over four hundred AI analyses and earned fifty-six verifiable certificates. In September 2026 the platform moved onto MCI's own infrastructure at aimedialab.africa, so the organisation owns the domain, the server and the data outright.
Key features
10 universities, 2 countries
Fact-checker that scores credibility and rules on each claim
Seven AI tools covering sourcing, ethics, legal and translation
Course, lesson and quiz authoring in the browser for educators
Certificates with QR codes that verify against the live database
Prompt pattern library with newsroom guardrails built in
Points, streaks and badges to keep cohorts moving
Screenshots
Inside the platform
Tech stack
See it live
aimedialab.africa