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Kenyan mobile money provider Safaricom is working on a partnership with Apple Inc. to integrate MPESA.  Soon, users will have a shiny new option to send and receive funds across the globe.

ICYMI:Back in 2018, M-Pesa executed a similar move by integrating with the American payment platform PayPal, enabling customers to deposit funds from M-PESA into the American payment system. Likewise, users had the option to transfer funds from PayPal into their M-PESA accounts.

So when will Apple Pay happen?  As of now, there are no specific details available regarding the current state of development. Interestingly, it was the Kenyan president who disclosed this upcoming partnership during his address at the ongoing US-African Business Roundtable just last week.

Zoom out: While the news of Safaricom’s partnership with Apple Inc. is undoubtedly exciting, it’s essential to recognize that other forward-thinking payment providers like Nala had already embraced the international payment system months before. Recently, Nigeria-based payment processor Interswitch made headlines by announcing its integration with Apple Pay competitor Google Pay. 

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Fact-checking African elections with AI

As of 2022, there were 384 million social media users in Africa, making social media an easy way to access news and information for Africans. Yet this comes with its risks. The easy accessibility of information means fake news can spread widely, making it hard for internet users to trust what they consume online.

According to a survey conducted by The University of Sheffield, almost half of African media consumers are increasingly exposed to misinformation every day.

With multiple elections scheduled to be held across different African countries, there has been an increase in fake news across diverse social media platforms. While fact-checking plays a key role in fixing this, there are not enough human fact-checkers on the continent to keep pace with serving the public with verified claims, given the massive and high-speed flow of political misinformation during elections.

Automated fact-checking (AFC) could help reduce the spread of online misinformation with tools driven by artificial intelligence like Storyzy, Emergent, Full Fact, Twitter Trails, Lazy Truth, ClaimReview, Factstream, etc. With a growing use around the world, adopting them can assist local fact-checkers in the processes of identifying or verifying fake news and information in real-time, and retrieving relevant evidence to debunk misleading claims as they arise. 

Abideen Olasupo, the founder of Nigeria-based FactCheckElections, believes the adoption of automated fact-checking in tackling election misinformation is still in its early stages in Africa, as there is a long way to go before the approach becomes widespread. “One challenge is the limited access to technology and the internet in many African countries, which makes it difficult to reach a wide audience with fact-checking information,” he told TechCabal. “Another is the limited funding for fact-checking platforms, which can make it difficult for them to scale their operations.”

Meanwhile, automated fact-checking may not accurately detect misinformation spread through visual content and complicated claims. Adesola Ikulajolu, the fact-check lead at RoundCheck, said the limitation of automated fact-checking is when verifying certain misinformation that can only be done via human verifications like phone calls and emails. “This is because automation can only work perfectly to the degree to which it has been programmed,” he told TechCabal. Ikulajolu recommends that for automated fact-checking to be fully adopted for elections in Africa, there should be a deliberate coalition of fact-checkers to provide verified information and authoritative data to be programmed.

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