Editors Note: New information technologies used during presidential election in Mozambique.Mozambique held presidential elections at the end of October, with the final results announced in mid-November. You couldn’t ignore the campaign buzz in the weeks leading to the polls: horn-honking caravans, city walls covered in colourful posters, supporters wearing T-shirts, caps and kapulanas (African cloth) emblazoned with party colours and logos.
The interesting twist is that people – and the press – quickly learned of incidents and glitches during the campaign and the polls thanks to citizen’s journalism, dispatches by ordinary folk about electoral irregularities countrywide.
People sent cellphone photos of government cars illegally used for campaigning, with registration plates - until officials wised up and started covering up plates and ministry logos with posters. Others texted reports of youth tearing down other party’s posters, fistfights, intimidation, and police lack of impartiality.
On election day, people reported the late opening of some polling booths and misbehaviour of poll officials and party observers.
Information was relayed by a network of 110 correspondents in the 11 provinces (most of them were community radio reporters) and citizens who texted, phoned and emailed.
The information was fact-checked and collected in a daily bulletin produced by the Centro de Integridade Publica (Centre for Public Integrity, an NGO anti-corruption monitor). Funding came from the Europeans Parliamentarians for Africa (AWEPA).
The Bulletin provided a credible, professional and impartial source of information, above party politics. Produced in Portuguese and English, it was emailed as pdf to some 3,000 subscribers, who redistributed it to at least double this number.
It was widely reproduced for free by the local press, especially the 60-something community radio stations. New information technologies are creating amazing opportunities for media and citizens in Africa.
One brilliant example is Ushahidi (“testimony” in KiSwahili), a mapping tool developed during the post-electoral ethnic violence in Kenya in 2008. Witnesses sent information about outbursts of violence, and this was uploaded onto Google Earth maps.
Ushahidi is a free, open source, user-friendly, web-based platform that allows crowdsourcing crisis information. In simple language, it allows people to pool information to respond to a crisis. People can text, twitter, email or upload to a website.
Ushahidi has been used to track swine flu globally, the humanitarian response to typhoons in the Philippines, and electoral irregularities in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Afghanistan, among others.
It could help chart cholera and meningitis outbreaks in Mozambique, both endemic diseases, well before the next elections in 2013.