Featured Case Study: Election Reporting from the Afghan Perspective
From Flickr user Canada in Afghanistan
In a few short hours, parliamentary elections will begin in Afghanistan. One year after his own re-election was marred by fraud and corruption, President Hamid Karzai has told reporters to expect irregularities. The Taliban has been intimidating voters and has kidnapped at least one parliamentary candidate and 18 election workers.
A project known as Alive in Afghanistan is working to let Afghanis participate in the political process by reporting on the fairness of the elections. Co-founder Brian Conley and his team previously worked in the country during last year’s presidential election. They set up Alive in Afghanistan, which uses the Ushahidi platform, to field reports sent via SMS. Learn more about their initial efforts by reading our case study on the project.
Brian returned to Afghanistan this summer and has been busy training reporters from the Pahjwok Afghan News network to do SMS reporting and teaching them how to use different multimedia services.
He anticipates that AiA will receive two to three times as many reports than they did during the presidential election because they are training more reporters and are working with a number of other election monitoring groups.
Reports are already rolling in from their reporters ahead of tomorrow’s election. Sample reports include:
Attack on the Governor’s home in Logar
Taliban destroying voting stations in Jalal Abad
Be sure to check out the Alive in Afghanistan site to view reports as they come in. You can also get updates on the project by following Brian on Twitter.
