Electoral disinformation is a growing threat to democratic processes across Africa, yet its scale and character remain poorly mapped — the field still leans heavily on North American and European cases. This project ("Mapping African Electoral Disinformation") set out to change that by developing a flexible, transferable methodology for studying election-related disinformation and applying it across a set of African elections.

The work combined digital media monitoring, ethnographic fieldwork, nationally representative surveys and expert interviews, alongside training, advocacy and public-engagement activities. A central aim was capacity-building — equipping local research teams and civil-society organisations to identify and counter disinformation themselves, and to engage technology platforms and policymakers around context-specific responses. Earlier elections (in countries such as Kenya, Nigeria and Zimbabwe) were used to design the approach, which was then applied around national elections in the DRC, Senegal and South Africa.