Will social media curb electoral fraud in Zambia?

By Ylva On September 20, 2011 · 3 Comments

We start our tour around the tech scene in Africa with some news on an interesting application utilising social media in Zambia.

Today Zambians are going to the polls to elect their next president, parliament and local governments. As in the past, there are fears of election fraud and violence, but this time there is an innovative mechanism in place to prevent misconduct. The secret is a crowd-sourced monitoring service, where citizens themselves report any irregularities they may see at the polling stations.

Image Credit: bantuwatch.org

How electorates use this platform

There are a number of ways electorates can report irregularities: (i) Voters simply send an SMS to a short code using their mobile phones (ii) Visit www.bantuwatch.org to report incidents online, or (iii) Tweet with hashtags #bantuwatch and #ZambiaElections. Reported incidents will be verified by official election observers, who can then act on the information quickly.

The service was launched last week and reports have already started coming in.

Bantuwatch is a service for crowd-sourced information built on the Ushahidi platform (more about them in the future, promise).

The initiative is run by Zambia’s civil society and social media representatives under SACCORD (Southern African Centre for the Constructive Resolution of Disputes – Probably the Longest Abbreviation Around ). The campaign is said to have been welcomed by the parties running for office, and hopefully it will help with maintaining a more peaceful and fair election day today. Fingers crossed….

About The Author

Ylva

Ylva was one of the founding members of the MEST project. She enjoys the challenges of her position which include: strategic development, public relations, operations, recruitment, financial management, and staff support. Recently Ylva has been a part of the small team launching the MEST incubator, where she supports the start-up teams as an in-house advisor. Prior to MEST, Ylva worked in Meltwater News as a Key Account Manager and Sales Manager. Ylva has earned a Bachelor's degree from Lund University in Sweden, with a major in Economics and a minor in Political Science. With a strong passion for traveling, Ylva has worked and traveled across five continents.

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3 Responses to Will social media curb electoral fraud in Zambia?

Daniel Thalhammer says:

September 20, 2011 at 10:10 am

Nice post, Ylva!

Another great application of the Ushahidi platform! Hopefully, if this initiative is successful, it will be rolled out across many more countries.

I wish the Zambian people a successful and fair election process!

Reply
Fredrik Karlberg says:

September 20, 2011 at 12:19 pm

Thanks,
great seeing a practical example being used in a local context. hope they’ll be successful, or not..

Reply
Looking back: Did social media curb election fraud in Zambia and other African countries? | The MEST Blog says:

December 14, 2011 at 6:32 pm

[...] in September we reported about how BantuWatch (on the Ushahidi platform) was used to collect crowd-sourced reports on [...]

Reply