RWECO members partipates in referendum observat ion - Kenya

James from RWECO, John Silco from RIC-NET and Crispna from CEDU are some of the Ugandans who participated in joint observation of the referendum in Kenya. By invitation from CRECO, a HIVOS partner organization from Kenya the trio joined a team of East African and European delegates to observe the referendum.
This exercise was designed to act as a pre-test of the regional HIVOS programme for elections and electoral processes monitoring and observation in the region.

At the closure of the exercise the foreigner observation team,HIVO's staff in Kenya and members Kenyan CSO(CRECO,CLARION,COBADES and 4Cs)held a press conference at Serena to give the preliminary report. the general statement was that the observes were to a great extend satisfied with the conduct of the referendum under the Interim Electoral Commission(IIEC).
By the observer team, the following was noted:

On the general, it was observed that the observation was properly organized and that in all areas where the roaming monitors had visited, the observers were present.

The combination of civic education, voter education and observation (complete with ICT) was a very good methodology and that it should be duplicated across the region.www.uchaguzi.co.ke

ICT- the use of text messages from our Observers and the public was splendid. It was observed that we could get more information from the public than our observers. However, the ICT team had to make a call to the senders of the messages or the poll watcher in the neighborhood to verify the message from the public. some reports might just be alarmist or send sms for fun.

There was a good number of manpower manning the command centre, the ICT centre at CRECO for observer's reports and at Ushahidi centre for the Public sourcing.

It was noted that at one time the centre needed more people due to the high number of sms’s coming in at the same time especially between 7.00am-11.00am then 5.00pm-10.00pm.
Some of the salient issues that were raised by observed in the Kenya should be noted by other east African countries with scheduled elections soon.

on the web based platform, it was noted that The reports once approved and posted were not easy to correct - for instance where there was a problem but intervention had been done and the situation had normalized one could not go to the site and update.
Recommendations:
1.The ushahidi tool used in Kenya should be developed and used in Tanzania, Uganda during their coming General Elections.
2.The lessons learned from the short message technology is that in every country, we should go for the bigger established network (like Safaricom in Kenya that CRECO had used) to avoid a technical hitch that normally arise from overcrowding in the network.
3.It was also imperative that we have the numbers for our recruited observers programmed by the service provider, and the software to be made to distinguish the messages from the public and the observers. At the least for our observers, the SMS message should automatically show the name of the observer, the constituency and the polling station.
4.The observation tools used should be localized to the various environments of each country and improved on any aspects that has been missing. A checklist for roaming monitors needs to be developed and availed.
5.Kenya and the Rwandan groups would share the report of the observation with the rest of the members from other countries.
6.Accreditation cards for international observers are usually done early by the electoral bodies and therefore planning has to start early. The visitors should be in the country a week before the election day so as to allow them get acquainted with the electoral process. Partners need to develop and avail information packs to visitors at the point of entry (hotel) for information and preparedness.