ARVO Election Monitoring

Nigeria’s elections have long faced challenges around misinformation, delayed incident reporting, and weak citizen participation in electoral monitoring. Fragmented reporting systems, reliance on unverified social media claims, and limited data sharing between observers reduced public trust in electoral outcomes.

To address these gaps, VIISAUS developed ARVO, a citizen-driven incident reporting and geospatial visualisation platform. The goal was clear: provide verified, real-time electoral data to citizens, civil society organisations (CSOs), media, and electoral bodies, thereby reducing misinformation and strengthening electoral integrity.

Built through a full-cycle digital product design process, ARVO included:

• A mobile-first interface for citizens and observers to report incidents with photos, descriptions, and GPS location.
• A map-based dashboard for visualising electoral hotspots in real time.
• A secure backend to validate and process reports quickly.

During deployment, over 1,000 verified incident reports were collected and visualised. Citizen submissions rose by 60 per cent compared to the previous cycle, while system uptime remained at 99.8 per cent during peak periods. The platform not only reduced the spread of fake news but also improved coordination between observers, CSOs, and the media.

Key enablers of success included early stakeholder engagement, simplicity of design for field users, and agile iteration based on live feedback. The platform proved adaptable, with strong potential to be repurposed for other civic monitoring uses such as public service delivery and accountability tracking.