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AFCN held its 3rd regional meeting in 2023

August 8, 2023

The Arab Fact-Checkers Network (AFCN) led by ARIJ, held on August 8, its seventh regional meeting and the third in 2023. The meeting was moderated by Rawan Damen, ARIJ Director General, welcoming AFCN community and the guest of the meeting, Bridget Gallagher, the media development consultant and expert in fundraising for more than 20 years, to discuss strategies and advice for Arab fact-checking organisations/initiatives to raise funding.

The meeting started with the introduction of four polls to discover more about the overall funding situation of the organisations/initiatives and why they are struggling with funding and how they plan to obtain and sustain funding.

Many representatives of the fact-checking organisations/initiatives emphasized that funding is a major challenge for them, and that many funding organisations don’t consider fact-checking as a priority yet.

Later on, the participants from 18 fact-checking organisations/initiatives in 9 Arab countries, heard from Gallagher about how to make a professional proposal to donors and how to make a plan to attract donors for the organisation. 

In the second part of the meeting, Gallagher reviewed how to deal professionally  with donors, the importance of diversifying sources of funding and taking advantage of opportunities to talk to them. At the end of the meeting, she received many questions from participants, and emphasized that finding funding isn’t easy and organisations should allocate a fixed part of their time to it.

It’s worth mentioning that this is the last virtual regional meeting for AFCN in 2023. The network held its second meeting last May to discuss updating the Network’s Code of Principles and announcing the new complaint policy. The last regional meeting will be held in-person in Amman next December, as part of ARIJ16 annual forum

This meeting is part of the “SA7” project of “Qarib” program which implemented by the French Media Development Agency (CFI), with the support of the French Development Agency (AFD). The project aims to enhance the best practices, methodologies and tools for fact-checking in the Arab region, specifically in 4 countries facing political, economic and security challenges where the  public confidence is declining in the media: Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and Iraq.

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