The West Africa Election Observers Network (WAEON) has deployed a four-member technical team from WAEON’s secretariat, CDD-Ghana, to Nigeria for an election exchange learning mission with the Abuja-based Yiaga Africa ahead of the country’s upcoming presidential and national assembly elections scheduled for February 25, 2023.
This forms part of the project titled, “Strengthening Election Observation in West Africa”.
The project aims to improve civil society election observations to strengthen electoral integrity in West Africa.
The project interventions seek to strengthen institutional capacity and leadership continuity within and among member organizations of the West African Election Observers (WAEON).
The Mission seeks to learn best practices from Yiaga Africa’s election observation management programming. Yiaga Africa is deploying the Parallel Vote Tabulation (PVT) to independently assess the electoral process and verify the accuracy of the official results of the presidential election that would be released during the elections.
Again, Yiaga Africa is pioneering a new election observation approach, the Election Results Analysis Dashboard (ERAD).
The ERAD is a technological innovation that seeks to improve the transparency and integrity of Nigeria’s elections. Under this approach, Yiaga Africa is collaborating with the media (Channels TV) to disseminate in near real-time analyzed data obtained from the Independent National Electoral Commission’s (INEC) electronic transmission system – INEC Results Viewing Portal (IReV).
Lessons drawn from this learning mission will be critical for CDD- Ghana’s election programming regarding Ghana’s election in 2024. Also, the experiences will be shared widely with WAEON members and other partners across the African continent.
WAEON’s Coordinator and Elections Team Lead at the Ghana Center for Democratic Development (CDD-Ghana), Mawusi Dumenu, said the learning exchange mission provides an opportunity for the team to document successes attained from implementing the new initiative (ERAD), challenges encountered and useful lessons that may be adopted for replication in Ghana and other African countries.
This Mission was made possible with funding from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
About WAEON
WAEON is an independent, non-partisan, and non-religious Network of citizen election observation /monitoring organizations in West Africa. The Network is headquartered in Ghana. Currently, WAEON consists of Citizens’ Election Observation Groups in 13 West African countries
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which includes Burkina Faso, Benin, Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea, Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Togo.
