JOKKONDIRAL

Overview

Jokkondiral is an open-source civic tech initiative designed to provide those involved in African citizen election monitoring with a shared digital infrastructure. Derived from the Fulani language, Jokkondiral means ‘to forge links, unity’: the aim is to bring together civil society organisations, movements and groups, developers and African citizens around a shared vision, conceived by and for the community. The initiative arose from the convergence of two complementary projects led by AfricTivistes: the development of technological tools for citizen-led election observation and coordination.

Context

Across the continent, election observers — CSOs, groups, citizens’ movements and observer networks — are still working with fragmented tools that are rarely shared, incompatible from one country to another, and often ill-suited to the realities on the ground. At the same time, civic tech hackathons produce promising prototypes that rarely survive beyond the event that gave rise to them. Yet the erosion of democracy in Africa calls for digital tools that are reliable, secure and tailored to local contexts.

Approach

Jokkondiral is shifting from a model of one-off innovation to that of a shared, sustainable and replicable digital infrastructure. The approach is based on co-creation: gathering requirements from the field via CSOs, online development sprints involving a community of developers, consolidation during a face-to-face event, followed by pilot tests and roll-out. The code is published under an open-source licence and remains the property of the community, which ensures its ongoing maintenance.