Who funds us?

Committed to integrity, we work day in, day out to improve our output and to align with the codes and principles of the International Fact-checking Network, a section of the Poynter Institute whose mission is to bring together fact-checkers from around the world. We work to adhere to their fundamental operating principles of commitment to impartiality, transparency and accuracy.

Balobaki Check is the editorial project of KOYEKOLA Center, a non-profit organisation (NGO) based in Kinshasa, registered under no. F92/52.736 with the DRC Ministry of Justice and the DRC Ministry of Communication and Media.

Founded in Kinshasa in 2022, we launched our activities a few months later with a single donor (Open Society Africa) as part of a partnership with a local organisation (CESD) working in social communication with communities.

Our commitment since then has been to increase and diversify the number of our financial backers, to ensure that no single donor has an influence on our work.

BALOBAKI Check is funded in part by the membership fees of the members of the Koyekola Center board of directors, and our business model is based primarily on consultancy services for journalism training.

To ensure our independence, we do not accept any financial support from political parties and to maintain our neutrality we do not allow members of Balobaki Check to publicly display political positions that may have a negative impact on our work.

Accepting financial support does not mean that Balobaki Check endorses the products, services or opinions of its donors. Donors have no say in our editorial productions. As part of its mission of transparency and independence, Balobaki Check lists here the donations and grants received as part of its work in the community.

Balobaki’s funding for 2024-2025 at a glance

Balobaki’s funding for 2022-2023 at a glance

Internews

From July 2023 to February 2024, BALOBAKI CHECK participated in the “Sango Ya Bomoko” project with the support of Internews in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) to combat hate speech and disinformation during the electoral period in the DRC. A project that provided useful institutional support for BALOBAKI in 2023.

The Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA)

Since the first quarter of 2022, 100 Congolese journalists have been trained in Fact-checking by BALOBAKI CHECK trainers, and some contribute to this site; primarily around the COVID-19 vaccine and all sorts of misinformation rife on social media and in the Congolese community. The program is funded by The Open Society Initiative for Southern Africa (OSISA) and implemented with our partner CESD Consulting; OSISA funding has provided significant financial support to BALOBAKI since 2022.

Support us

You can contribute to supporting our commitment to checking facts.

Donate

Our partners

Since the last electoral campaign in 2023, BALOBAKI CHECK has been working on a voluntary basis with Cartooning for Peace, with the support of CFI, to raise community awareness of the damaging effects of misinformation through press cartoons.

Website

BALOBAKI CHECK is a member of Factoscope.fr, a French-language portal providing resources for fact-checking and media and information education (MIE) with the support of CFI. Some BALOBAKI CHECK fact-checks are also published on the Factoscope website, which is run by the University of Tours in France.