BANDAR SERI BEGAWAN – Social enterprise Big BWN Project is partnering with online news publisher The Scoop to carry out the ASEAN Digital Literacy Programme (DLP), a region-wide initiative to combat online disinformation in Southeast Asia.
Led by the ASEAN Foundation with the support of a US$ 1.5 million grant from Google.org, the ASEAN DLP aims to combat misinformation and disinformation by providing digital literacy training for youth, teachers, parents, community leaders, and government officials in collaboration with local implementing partners in 10 ASEAN member states.
The two-year programme will equip more than 1,000 trainers across the region with the media and information literacy skills they need to train over 100,000 people in their respective communities.
“We hope this programme will be an important milestone for ASEAN to strengthen the digital literacy skills of its people, and transform them into agents of change that can combat online misinformation and disinformation”, said Cresentia Novianti, project manager of the ASEAN Digital Literacy Programme.
As the implementing partners for Brunei Darussalam, Big BWN Project and The Scoop will carry out a Training of Trainers (ToT) session for the ASEAN DLP in Bandar Seri Begawan from November 5-6, 2022.
Fifty master trainers from Brunei will be recruited to participate in the ToT workshop, where they will learn about disinformation and media literacy. The end goal is for each participant to “pay it forward” and conduct their own outreach session for 100 people, training them to be “disinformation detectives”.
“Through this domino effect, we hope to reach over 5,000 people in Brunei Darussalam – particularly those in underserved communities such as youth, the elderly, people with disabilities, and those living in rural areas – so that we can share the tools to fight disinformation widely,” The Scoop and Big BWN Project said in a statement.