Imagine sitting in a crowded market in Lagos, Kano, or Enugu, your phone buzzing with a video clip of a well-known political figure. The audio is crisp, the face moves naturally, and the message is shocking—something designed to provoke anger, deepen division, or swing a vote at the last minute. But the clip is not real. It has been generated by artificial intelligence, and it is part of a much larger wave of fabrication now washing over Nigeria in the lead-up to the country’s elections. This is the threat that the Engage Empower Educate Initiative has set out to confront with the launch of Peace by Design: Responsible AI for Peace in Africa, a continent-wide project targeting what its founders describe as one of the most urgent threats to democratic integrity on the continent: the weaponisation of artificial intelligence to manufacture lies at scale. During the launch, the Initiative warned that fabricated videos and voice clones of public figures are already circulating online, engineered to look and sound just real enough to deceive. What makes this moment different from past election cycles is not simply that lies exist—disinformation has always been part of politics—but that this new generation of fakes is fast, cheap to produce, and convincing enough to fool even careful viewers. And it arrives in a media environment with precious little infrastructure to catch it before it spreads across WhatsApp, Facebook, TikTok, and local radio. The Initiative’s message is not meant to provoke fear, but to provoke action. The time to act, they insist, is before ballots are cast, not after the damage has already shaped the outcome and the aftermath.
At the heart of the project is a clear-eyed recognition that artificial intelligence can be used for good or for harm, and that without deliberate intervention, harm is what we will get. Belema Meshack-Hart, Founder of the Engage Empower Educate Initiative, articulated this urgency during the launch. “We built Peace by Design because we saw the danger before it became a crisis,” she said. “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 afterwards.” Her words carry weight because they describe something already happening, not hypothetical. In previous elections, disinformation might have taken the form of altered photographs, misleading headlines, or manipulated audio clips that were crude enough to be detected by a skeptical audience. But today’s AI-generated content is different. A voice clone can impersonate a governor, a religious leader, or an election official with startling accuracy. A deepfake video can place a candidate in a room where they have never been, saying words they have never spoken. The visual and auditory cues that once helped people detect fakes are disappearing. Even journalists with years of experience have been fooled by sophisticated AI creations. The result is a media landscape in which truth becomes difficult to verify in real time, and where a single viral clip can inflame tensions in a country with deep ethnic, religious, and political sensitivities. The Initiative understands that the challenge is not merely technical but deeply human: restoring people’s faith that what they see and hear can be trusted, and giving communities the confidence to pause before they share.
The project’s flagship effort, “Verify Before You Share”, is designed to meet voters exactly where disinformation actually spreads. It is not a top-down campaign that lectures people from a distance; instead, it is a nationwide, non-partisan movement built around local messengers, local languages, and the everyday platforms ordinary Nigerians rely on. WhatsApp groups are often the primary source of news for millions of people, especially in communities where internet access is limited and radio remains the most trusted medium. The campaign will therefore operate across radio broadcasts, mobile messaging, and local-language content in every region of the country. It will train a network of Digital Peace Ambassadors—respected community members, youth leaders, women’s group representatives, students, and religious figures—who understand the cultural context and can recognize manipulation when they see it. These ambassadors will be equipped with practical tools to spot AI-generated content, verify suspicious media, and help their neighbours think critically before forwarding anything inflammatory. In addition to this grassroots education, the Initiative will stand up a rapid-response fact-checking desk dedicated to investigating viral content during the election period. When a questionable video emerges, the desk will work quickly to determine its authenticity, publish clear findings, and support the spread of accurate information to counter the fake. The campaign will also press platforms, political parties, and candidates to commit publicly to a no-deepfake pledge, asking them to promise not to create, use, or disseminate AI-manipulated content intended to deceive voters. This combination of education, verification, and accountability is what makes the project different: it does not simply react to lies after they have gone viral, but works to disrupt the ecosystem that allows them to flourish.
The urgency of the moment was first brought into sharp focus at the International Peace Summit 2.0, an event organized by the Initiative where experts gathered to discuss the intersection of artificial intelligence, peace communication, and democracy in Africa. One of those experts, Ezinne Okoro, led the workshop on AI and peace communication and has now joined the Initiative as a close partner on the project. Her experience in that workshop left her with no doubt about the scale of the challenge. “What we heard in that room made clear this isn’t a future risk; it’s happening now,” she explained. “Communities need the tools to recognise manipulation in real time, and they need them before ballots are cast, not after the damage is done.” The workshop brought together technology researchers, media practitioners, civil society leaders, and young people from across the continent, and the evidence they shared was alarming. In multiple countries, there were already documented cases of AI-generated content being used to attack political opponents, suppress voter participation, and incite fear. At the same time, there was a striking absence of coordinated response mechanisms—few fact-checking organizations had the capacity to analyze deepfakes, few journalists were trained to identify them, and few community groups knew how to talk about them with the public. For Okoro, the solution is not to dismiss AI as purely a threat, nor to treat technology as a savior. Rather, it is to build a culture of digital literacy and civic responsibility that is strong enough to withstand manipulation. That is why Peace by Design places so much emphasis on grassroots education and why the voices of local leaders are central to the campaign. If people feel they have ownership over the truth, they are less likely to be passive consumers of lies.
The Initiative is also turning its attention to the powerful technology platforms that operate in Nigeria, and its message to them is direct: act now, not after the damage is done. For years, platforms have been criticized for responding to election-related harms only after crises have erupted, and Nigeria has often been treated as a secondary market where content moderation is slower and less thorough. The Initiative is calling on major companies to label AI-generated content clearly, so that users know when they are seeing something that has been manufactured rather than recorded. They are also urging platforms to accelerate the takedown of election-related fakes, particularly those that could incite violence or undermine the credibility of the electoral process. Perhaps most importantly, they are asking for investment in moderation capacity in Hausa, Yoruba, Igbo, and Pidgin—languages spoken by tens of millions of Nigerians and yet too often an afterthought for global trust-and-safety teams. The practical reality is that English-language moderation is far stronger than moderation in African languages, even though many of the most dangerous deepfakes are shared in local languages to maximize emotional impact. When a video circulates in a small community WhatsApp group with a voice overlay in Igbo or Hausa, it may evade detection for hours or even days because there are not enough human reviewers who understand the language and can assess its authenticity. The Initiative’s call is a plea for equity: Nigerian voters deserve the same level of protection from AI manipulation as voters in wealthier countries. It is also a recognition that the responsibility for peaceful elections cannot rest solely on citizens and civil society—it must be shared by the companies whose algorithms amplify viral content and the political actors who benefit from confusion and division.
Ultimately, Peace by Design is a project about hope as much as it is about caution. It grows out of the belief that peace is not an accident, but something that must be designed, built, and maintained by deliberate human choices. In the coming months, the Initiative will call on international AI developers, fact-checking organizations, and funders to join the effort ahead of the election, creating a coalition that transcends borders. The problem of AI-generated disinformation is not unique to Nigeria, but Nigeria’s response could become a model for the rest of Africa and the world. By building a movement that is community-rooted, non-partisan, and deeply aware of the human stakes, the initiative aims to prove that ordinary people are not powerless in the face of sophisticated technology. The message to voters is not one of fear, but of empowerment: before you share, pause. Ask yourself whether the source is trustworthy, whether the content feels designed to provoke, and whether you would stake your peace on its truth. That simple act of reflection—multiplied across millions of people—could be the difference between an election shaped by lies and one shaped by informed, peaceful choice. The future of democracy in Nigeria may depend less on the algorithms that create content and more on the wisdom of the communities that receive it. By designing peace into the way people understand, verify, and share information, the Engage Empower Educate Initiative is betting that truth, anchored by human connection, can still outrun deception at scale.