Guidelines Launched to Boost Electoral Data Access Across Africa
A key ingredient of successful elections is access to credible, accurate and transparent electoral data. However, some African polls are fraught with a lack of access to credible, accurate, and transparent electoral data. This undermines public trust, fuels misinformation and contestation, and ultimately weakens the perceived legitimacy of election outcomes and democratic institutions. Further, data informs decisions whether automated by algorithms or made by humans and is the fuel of machine-learning Artificial Intelligence (AI) – and voters need to know if and how their elections are affected.
Recognising this, the African Alliance for Access to Data, with support from the Collaboration on International ICT Policy for East and Southern Africa (CIPESA) and Research ICT Africa (RIA), commissioned research that resulted in “Guidelines on data access for key stakeholders in African elections”. This resource offers three sets of guidelines for EMBs, political actors and civil society.
The study built on extensive stakeholder consultations, including interviews with 16 experts from Nigeria, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, South Africa, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Senegal and Tanzania. Participants included members of parliament, electoral support organizations, fact-checkers, researchers, journalists, EMB representatives and civil society organizations.
Findings highlight challenges like unstructured data collection, lack of transparency in campaign finance records, data manipulation risks and disparities in data availability. And, while digital voter registration has improved accessibility, it emerges that inconsistencies persist between national and local data sets. Fact-checkers emphasize the need for timely access to reliable data to counter misinformation and disinformation.
The study’s key recommendations include: implementing open data principles, promoting proactive data disclosure, improving EMB data management, enhancing stakeholder collaboration, safeguarding data integrity, supporting capacity building in data literacy and strengthening legal frameworks to balance transparency with privacy concerns.
To safeguard democracy across the continent, the Guidelines should move beyond paper into practice through widespread adoption, continuous collaboration, and shared accountability among all electoral stakeholders.
