Engage Empower Educate Initiative warns that unchecked deepfakes and synthetic media threaten to distort the vote and inflame tension across Nigeria
The Engage Empower Educate Initiative today announced the launch of Peace by Design: Responsible AI for Peace in Africa, a continent-wide project confronting one of the most urgent threats to Nigeria’s upcoming elections: the weaponization of artificial intelligence to manufacture lies at scale.
The warning is blunt. Fabricated videos and voice clones of public figures are already circulating online, engineered to look and sound real. Unlike the disinformation of past election cycles, this new generation of fakes is fast, cheap to produce, and convincing enough to fool even careful viewers — arriving in a media environment with little infrastructure to catch it before it spreads.
“We built Peace by Design because we saw the danger before it became a crisis,” said Belema Meshack-Hart, Founder of the Engage Empower Educate Initiative. “A fabricated video of a candidate can spread across WhatsApp in minutes and shape how millions of people vote, or whether they trust the result at all. Nigeria cannot afford to treat this as a side issue. This is a direct threat to the integrity of the election and to the peace of the country afterward.”
The project’s flagship effort, “Verify Before You Share,” is a nationwide, non-partisan campaign built to reach voters where disinformation actually spreads: WhatsApp groups, radio, and local-language content across Nigeria’s regions. It will train a network of Digital Peace Ambassadors, stand up a rapid-response fact-checking desk, and press platforms, political parties, and candidates to commit publicly to a no-deepfake pledge.
Ezinne Okoro, who led the workshop on AI and peace communication in Africa at the International Peace Summit 2.0, will work closely with the Initiative on the project. That workshop is where the scale of the threat, and the absence of a coordinated response, first came into focus.
“What we heard in that room made clear this isn’t a future risk, it’s happening now,” said Ezinne Okoro. “Communities need the tools to recognize manipulation in real time, and they need them before ballots are cast, not after the damage is done.”
The Initiative is also calling on major technology platforms operating in Nigeria to act now, not after the damage is done, urging them to label AI-generated content clearly, accelerate takedowns of election-related fakes, and invest in moderation capacity in Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, and Pidgin — languages that are too often an afterthought for global trust-and-safety teams.
“Every day this goes unaddressed is a day disinformation gets a head start,” Meshack-Hart added. “We are asking platforms, regulators, and political leaders to move with the same urgency we are. Nigeria’s peace is not something to be tested this election season.”
Peace by Design grew out of the International Peace Summit 2.0, organized by the Initiative. The Initiative is calling on international AI developers, fact-checking organizations, and funders to join the effort ahead of the election.