Project

Development of Sustainable Voter Registration Methodologies in Sub-Saharan Africa

Grantee: Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa (EISA)

In recent decades, virtually every African country has at some point considered modernizing voter registration technology. New ICT applications have been adopted in many African countries, particularly in post-conflict situations. The project was based on a sound strategy that clearly identified the institutional weaknesses in voter registration models. In selecting partner countries, geographic balance, a variety of political contexts, linguistic diversity, and different levels of technical knowledge were sought. The project’s aim was to generate knowledge and disseminate it among experts and institutional stakeholders. However, the link between knowledge, capacity, and the actual election process, which depends primarily on political will, was not explicitly established in the project design, nor was it incorporated as such in the project strategy.

All project activities were successfully implemented and even delivered beyond expectations. The project management team developed a strong organizational and logistical support mechanism to guarantee smooth operation of the database and provided easy and immediate access to it. The project had a number of positive impacts, including ongoing in-depth discussions of voter registration reforms.

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Lessons from Project

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Despite positive aspects of relevance, the ultimate barriers to free and fair elections in Africa and elsewhere are political, not technological. That being said, the logical framework of the project explicitly targeted the elections community, not the actual or potential voters, who, of course, were reasonably considered to be indirect beneficiaries of the project.

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However, Electoral Management Bodies were viewed primarily as interviewees and workshop participants, and all activities were implemented by international practitioners. It is hard to see the capacity building here. The original project document and logframe did not include activities to assess or monitor voter registation practices

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The incorporation of the specific voter registration findings matrix into other programmes also enhanceds sustainability. For example the BRIDGE programme has a unique curriculum designed to reach all direct and indirect electoral stakeholders, including CSOs, local observers, the media, electoral monitoring groups.

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The use of well-qualified project members who stayed involved to the end of the project also contributed to its effectiveness. The mapping and database researcher and case study consultants, as well as the reference panel members, had hands-on experience with voter registration methodologies in different African countries with different languages and election logistics.

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Hands-on project management and close supervision of activities played a key role. All planned activities were carefully organized by the project management team. All project files seen by the evaluator show that each activity was the object of specific methodological guidance, setting priorities, identifying needs, and determining how to meet these goals.

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One of the project’s main contributions was to show that each country’s political, demographical and historical backgrounds are unique and that voter registration systems cannot be adopted without in-depth consideration of all national specificities. The same system can work perfectly in one country but fail in a neighboring one.

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The project clearly added value at a time when elections in African countries are sometimes jeopardized by a lack of voter registration methodologies and the public’s distrust of technology for example in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Cote d’Ivoire. Acknowledging that no single voter registration system is appropriate in all cases and that there is no literature on the subject were major steps that no other donors had ever supported.

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