‘Bantu Watch’ helps Zambia turn ICT into a mass vote monitoring tool

by bantuwatch2010 on September 26, 2011

By Brenda Zulu

Zambians voting or monitoring the September 20 elections had a pleasant surprise in store for them when Bantu Watch, a joint platform of Civil Society (social) media representatives in Zambia, was unveiled showing the use of the SMS (Short Message Service) as a tool for monitoring and reporting electoral malpractices.

HIVOS, Coordinator ICT election Watch, Sanne van den Berg, said she was pleased with the way Zambians sent in quality reports although she said the numbers of SMSs was low in terms of numbers. She explained that this was due to technical difficulties with Airtel messages.

She was also happy that by monitoring the SMSs and tweets sent to Bantu Watch from both monitors and the general public, there were an incredible high number of actionable reports of which SACCORD acted upon.

Meanwhile, SODNET’s Program Associate Innovations and Knowledge Management, John Kipchumbah, said his participation in Bantu Watch has been an amazing experience that shows what the power of the people can do. “Their vigilance and their commitment to protecting their vote has been very visible,” he said.

“I had the privilege of viewing the citizens’ voices streaming into the platform, the level of commitment, the passion, shows that people do know what they want and increasingly they are using channels presented to them to get action on their issues. I take home a very clear message that what we as individuals do can or will make a very big difference by making that decision to care for what affects us and others among us and that we have the power to make a difference,” said Kipchumbah.

He added that the platform under the guidance of committed individuals in both the Southern Africa Centre for Constructive Resolution of Disputes (SACCORD) and the Africa Interactive Media representatives has a very huge potential to be a citizens channel to give feedback on specific issues on governance, development and economic grown for young people presenting connections at different level.

Verifying SMSs and twitter reports on the Bantu Watch platform Lukonga Lindunda, a Tech Enthusiast, said being part of the Bantu Watch team has been a learning experience for him and the Tech minds who have been motivated to map this year’s elections.

“On Election Day there was an increase in reports and we really had to work under pressure to verify the reports from Zambians sending SMSs on electoral malpractices. The Ihub shows that many reports were from Lusaka and the Copperbelt provinces,” said Lindunda.

He explained that the people verifying the Bantu Watch Ihub were Tech minds who were graduates from Evelyn Hone College of Applied Arts and Commerce, University of Zambian (UNZA) and NIPA.

We have been interested in what Ushahidi was all about and discovered that it was an open source tool with roots in Kenya. When we got to play with Ushahidi we discovered that we could use it for other things and soon after elections we will be trying to use it for something else.

He added that they also monitored tweets under the hashtag #BantuWatch. BantuWatch is a joint initiative of civil society and (social) media representatives in Zambia under leadership of SACCORD. Hivos and SODNET provided technical support to the project.

BantuWatch is an Ushahidi-based technology platform that allows citizens and civil society to monitor and report incidences around the electoral process. It provides a way for citizens and civil society to use phones or the internet to report on electoral offences such as intimidation, hate speech, vote buying, polling clerk bias and voting misinformation.

Reports from citizens were collected and visualized online together with those of trained observers from civil society partners. Incidents that needed to be responded to were channelled to the electoral or security authorities after trained persons from civil society verified citizen messages with contacts on the ground.

The compiled data of allsubmitted reports was used for reporting to the media and interested parties – at any point in the process. At the end of the election exercise, the data becomes part of a report with recommendations for future improvements to the election process.

source: http://bantuwatch.wordpress.com/2011/09/26/%e2%80%98bantu-watch%e2%80%99-helps-zambia-turn-ict-into-a-mass-vote-monitoring-tool/