[1][2] Africa Check is an independent organisation with offices in Johannesburg, Nairobi, Lagos, Dakar and London, producing reports in English and French testing claims made by public figures, institutions and the media against the best available evidence.

[1] Africa Check was launched by Peter Cunliffe-Jones after it won an International Press Institute news innovation contest sponsored by Google.

[3] Africa Check's main team is based in Johannesburg, South Africa at the Journalism Department of the University of the Witwatersrand, where they currently have a fact-checking team including their Chief Editor, along with fundraising, training and research services and a head of digital communication.

In October 2015, Africa Check established a fact-checking team based at the EJICOM school of journalism in Dakar, Senegal.

Africa Check has also opened regional offices in Lagos, Nigeria (in 2016) and Nairobi, Kenya (in 2017) and now employs around 30 fact checkers.

[5][6] In the same month Peter Cunliffe-Jones, the 2012 founder of Africa Check, announced that he would resign from his position as executive director with effect from May 2019 as he had been appointed as the International Fact-Checking Network's senior adviser.

During the subsequent sixth annual Global Fact-Checking Summit they gathered information about the status and development of the fact checking industry.

[12][13] Originating with the World Health Organization (WHO) in 2008, the claim that 80% of South Africans use traditional healers has been spread by the news media worldwide.

All of these issues make exact comparisons of rape rates across countries impossible, because the data is currently too unreliable.

[17][18][19] In the same month Facebook also started to provide fact checking tools to reduce fake news in Nigeria.

[26] Australia's home affairs, immigration and border protection minister Peter Dutton had relied on false reports that murders of white South African farmers happened every week.

[27] In November 2020 Africa Check exposed fake news issued by former Joburg mayor Herman Mashaba who had claimed in a tweet that there were 15-million "undocumented foreigners" living in South Africa and who had willingly misinterpreted correct information published by other reputable sources.

[34] Banathi Mgqoboka of Rhodes University's School of Journalism and Media Studies in South Africa became the first anglophone African journalism student to be shortlisted for the inaugural best fact-checking report by a student journalist award while attending the Cape Peninsula University of Technology in 2017.