AfricTivistes launches Jokkondiral, an open-source civic tech initiative for citizen election observation in Africa!

AfricTivistes launches Jokkondiral, a collective effort to build open-source civic tech tools dedicated to citizen election observation in Africa. The Jokkondiral platform and mobile app will be sharable, sustainable infrastructure, adaptable to each national context, helping to make electoral processes across the continent more transparent.

Jokkondiral, a word in Fula language means “to forge connections, to come together” which is precisely the ambition to bring together civil society organisations, movements and groups (CSOs), developers and citizens across Africa around a single shared momentum  designed by and for the community. Above all, the launch marks the beginning of this collective work and building of the community that will bring the tools to life.

Meeting a real need on the ground

Across the continent, those who observe elections — CSOs, community groups, citizen movements and observer networks — are still working with tools that are fragmented, rarely pooled and often ill-suited to conditions on the ground. At the same time, civic tech hackathons produce promising prototypes that rarely outlive the event that gave rise to them.

Jokkondiral sets out to fill this gap by shifting from one-off innovation to shared, lasting and replicable digital infrastructure. The project grew out of the convergence of two complementary programmes led by AfricTivistes:

• the development of technological tools — mobile apps and platforms — for citizen election observation, monitoring and coordination, under the AHEAD Africa project;
• the #Tech4Good civic tech hackathon, powered by young people’s digital innovation, under the Digitalise Youth project.

What the community is building together

In practical terms, Jokkondiral will bring together a customisable web-based election-observation platform and a mobile app for citizen observers. Beyond the tools themselves, Jokkondiral aims to bring into being a pan-African community of civic tech developers committed for the long term — the owner and guardian of this shared infrastructure.

How to get involved

Are you a civil society organisation, movement or group? Your experience is the raw material of this platform. Share your practices, your tools and the difficulties you encounter in electoral procedures by filling in our field-needs survey — just 10 minutes is enough to help shape a tool that genuinely fits the way you work.

Together, let’s build the tools that African democracy deserves.

👉 Contribute now: jokkondiral.netlify.app