As night fell on January 13 as Uganda’s citizens were preparing to vote in presidential and parliamentary polls the next day, a country of 44-million people was cut off from the world when the government blocked internet access.

For our fact-checking team in Uganda, who were monitoring the possible deluge of mis- and disinformation surrounding the election, the task suddenly became a lot more difficult.

Deprived of online and open-source tools for fact-checking, as well as most means of sharing the debunking to Uganda’s voters, PesaCheck had to quickly adapt its fact-checking processes to stop disinformation before it could impact Uganda’s democratic processes.

Triggering the shutdown

Days before the election, an investigation by Code for Africa’s partners, the Digital Forensic Research Lab, revealed a complex network of websites, public relations companies, bots and sock puppet accounts working across Facebook and Twitter to spread disinformation about candidates challenging incumbent president Yoweri Museveni and his National Resistance Movement party. The investigation led to both platforms purging these accounts and ones linked to them for coordinated inauthentic behaviour. Days later, the Ugandan government would blame this purge for their own internet shutdown.

However, this process had already begun weeks before when Ugandans were denied access to Google’s Play Store, Apple’s App Store and social media sites through a directive from the Uganda Communications Commission. At the time, it was still possible to bypass these government restrictions by using a virtual private network (VPN) — a tool that lets users access region-restricted websites and content — but when the complete shutdown happened, even VPNs proved ineffective at circumventing the state’s measures.

PesaCheck is East Africa’s first public finance fact-checking initiative. It was co-founded by Catherine Gicheru and Justin Arenstein, and is being incubated by the continent’s largest civic technology and data journalism accelerator: Code for Africa. It seeks to help the public separate fact from fiction in public pronouncements about the numbers that shape our world, with a special emphasis on pronouncements about public finances that shape government’s delivery of Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) public services, such as healthcare, rural development and access to water/sanitation. PesaCheck also tests the accuracy of media reportage. To find out more about the project, visit pesacheck.org.

Code for Africa (CfA) is the continent’s largest network of civic technology and data journalism labs, with teams in 12 countries. CfA builds digital democracy solutions that give citizens unfettered access to actionable information that empowers them to make informed decisions, and that strengthens civic engagement for improved public governance and accountability. This includes building infrastructure like the continent’s largest open data portals at openAFRICA and sourceAFRICA, as well as incubating initiatives as diverse as the africanDRONE network, the PesaCheck fact-checking initiative and the sensors.AFRICA air quality sensor network.