By Daniel Tyokua
The Centre for Civic Citizens’ Welfare and Community Development, Africa (CWCD) has unveiled an election monitoring platform to promote transparency during the forthcoming general elections in the country.
During the launch in Abuja, the Chief Executive Officer The CANs Innovation Hub Abuja, an arm of the CWCDC Khalil Halilu said the unveiling of the platform, ‘Zabe’ 2.0 would bring about fairness in election management come 2023 and beyond.
He said Zabe which means, ‘to vote in Hausa’ was designed by The CANs an arm of the CWCDC as part of it responsibility in proffering solutions to challenges in the society.
Halilu explained that Zabe 2.0 was an upgrade to the Zabe 1.0 app in 2018 being designed for data collection and processing system planned ahead of Nigerian’s 2023 general elections.
“The idea of Zabe came from the trends happening on social media during election, which involves people rushing to the social media to verify, post, and retweet. The platform will create an effective system to enable trust in the electoral system” Halilu said.
In his contributions, the programs lead for the Foundation, Mr. Anthony Eromosele revealed that the platform was built to provide average with a means to report from their communities what happen before, during, and after elections and also express their views on the ways in which the electoral process is conducted.
He said: “Zabe 2.0 system wound bring about full control of dashboard management, including analytics and user permission.
“We are very intentional about this program, bringing to bear experiences, lessons and key insights from Zabe 1.0.
“The app will raise the bar of election transparency in Africa. It will rides on the most up-to-date data collection, processing and sharing technologies. The new features include a secure and encrypted chat platform, news bulletin, Survey, contact centre, and voter education centre”.
According to Halilu, the exercise was made possible by the civic tech fund project in partnership with the Goree Institute, charter project Africa and European Union.
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