AEP provides leadership in the use of ICT for Election 2012

African Election Project (AEP) is providing leadership in the use of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) for Election 2012.

This is being done with the launching of Ushahidi platform - Ghana Votes (http://ghvotes2012.com) to map incidents around the Biometric Voter Registration.

A statement issued in Accra on Thursday and copied to the Ghana News Agency said AEP, is providing the leadership as part of its project "Enabling Peaceful, Transparent and Credible Elections in Ghana Using New Media Platform" funded by Strengthening Transparency Accountability and Responsiveness in Ghana (STAR-Ghana).

Ushahidi which means "testimony" in Swahili was a website that was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008.

The GhanaVotes2012-ushahidi platform, has been specially developed and designed to display reports from the Electoral Commission, civil society groups and citizens on the upcoming Ghana elections.

The map will provide information about everything from security issues, polling station logistics to voter education activities.

In addition, the map will display all the voting polling stations, which are linked to AEP poll finder application, and will also contain information on Parliamentary, Presidential Candidates and political parties by constituency and regions, making the map a one-stop shop for election information.

The idea behind the project is to encourage full citizen participation in the electoral process by providing them a modern, attractive, user-friendly and interactive well structured online election platform to easily enable citizens, journalists and civil society organisations share news, audio and videos about the Ghana Elections via multiple channels including a toll-free SMS short code (prefix aep to 1902 on all network and 7000 on MTN), email, twitter and web forms.

The information collected is verified and published with a dynamic timeline that shows when and where every incident happened.

African Elections Project Director, Jerry Sam, added that "Apart from the Ghana Votes platform, the project will involve the use of an online ICT portal mashed up with facebook, twitter, flickr, youtube, podcasts, and Blackberry broadcasts (BB Pin: 28F11BFF and 21685758) to enable citizens and other stakeholders easily share insights, experiences, and perspectives with each other and also send and receive images, video and audio about the electoral process to promote and ensure transparency and credibility in the final outcome of the elections".

AEP established in 2008, is coordinated by the International Institute of ICT Journalist (Penplusbytes) and covers elections using Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) across the continent.

It has successfully covered elections in Ghana (2008) Botswana, Namibia, Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire, Mauritania, Mozambique, Malawi, Togo, Niger and Liberia.

STARGhana is a multi- donor pooled funding mechanism Funded by DFID, DANIDA, EU and USAID to increase the influence of civil society and Parliament in the governance of public goods and service delivery, with the ultimate goal of improving the accountability and responsiveness of Ghana's government, traditional authorities and the private sector.**