Jehad Oumer Combats the Pandemic with His Sole Weapon: Knowledge

Since COVID-19 began to spread throughout the African continent in March 2020, it seemed that the flood of fake news was, similar to the virus, also going viral. This increase of misinformation was often perpetuated by unreliable media platforms and presented a serious challenge for concerned citizens from every country. To that effect, Jehad Oumer, an LAU MEPI TL student majoring in Computer Science, helped in launching #DontGoViral, an awareness campaign initiated by i4Policy with the partnership of UNESCO. Innovation for Policy Foundation (i4Policy) supports public policy co-creation at scale in Africa. Oumer’s role was to volunteer his time and expertise in helping i4Policy build and manage an open Wikimedia platform, www.dontgoviral.wiki, as a hub for all artistic-educative based materials crowdsourced from artists across African local communities, focusing on fighting misinformation and share it to the public at large. Oumer also took the lead in translating the crowdsourced content from English into Arabic. Being one of the first of its kind, the #DontGoViral campaign eventually went viral, reaching more than  200 million hits on Social Media, and with more than 500+ content submitted from 46 countries across the continent.

« Give me a tragedy and I will show you a hero » is Oumer’s motto who is always ready for a greater challenge to serve his community.