KDI, with an understanding of the growing number of young internet users in Nigeria, researched a series of digital infrastructures and models, eliciting the opinions of thousands of young Nigerians with the guide of the Co/Act Toolkit to develop 9jaTalks. 9jaTalks is a digital civic and voter education platform from young Nigerians for young Nigerians that use youth-friendly audio-visual materials and a blend of entertainment to close the civic and voter education gap amidst Nigeria's youth demographics, who make up 51.1% of the registered voters as of 2019 and are equally active and native internet users. As of January 2021, this demographic is part of Nigeria's 104.4 million internet users and over 33 million active social media users, with a median age of 18.1.

We are motivated by the understanding that effective voter education is a building block for preventing electoral integrity problems, aiding voter choices, and contributing to increased citizen participation. Access to explicit details of how to mark your ballot paper, which would reduce Invalid or spoilt votes. Also, when the majority know election day processes and procedures, misinformation or disinformation will be reduced. – Bukola Idowu, Project Coordinator, 9jaTalks.

9jaTalks has a series of human-centred features that grant users, access to quality electoral information anywhere with a blend of fun and entertainment. These include:

• Expert Hangout: The most engaging feature on 9jaTalks, where top celebrities and election experts interact with young Nigerians on civic life and electoral processes and procedure in an informal and relaxed manner. 9jaTalks has secured the commitment and partnership with over nine (9) A-rated entertainers in Nigeria; this includes Alibaba, Ireti Doyle, Mr Macaroni, Elvina Ibru and Mr Hyenana as part of the Nigeria’s Celebrities that young people can hangout with.
• Forum Discussion: This feature gives the citizens, especially the youth, the platform to discuss their ideas and hopes for credible and inclusive elections. It is also a place where young Nigeria organize for civic action. Beyond the elections, 9jaTalks serves as a platform where citizens track their elected officials’ performance on essential policy priorities, organize digitally, and build citizen alliances to demand accountability from public servants. This contributes to the active participation of young people in civic life.
• Resources: This house transferable voter and civic education contents. These contents include Infographics, explainer videos and Vox pop that explain the electoral legal framework, electoral processes and procedures.
• Opportunities: While young Nigerians enjoy these voter and civic education contents – the opportunities segment grants them access to career opportunities and score job points.

Analytics shows that 9jaTalks has reached over 1.5 million young Nigerians through its youth-friendly multi-media civic and voter education information in 3 months after its launch in October 2022.

Improving Citizen-Legislative Participation through Digital Tools (#Tech4Legislature) is an initiative that aims at leveraging technology to bridge the interaction gap between citizens and their representatives. Additionally, to increase legislature accountability, transparency, and openness in Nigeria through ICT. We do this by developing e-parliament platforms with the tools for citizen-legislature interaction across legislatures in Nigeria. KDI has started this with the Osun State House of Assembly (OSHA).

Project Goal

1. To improve citizen-legislature engagement through the development and adaptation of an e-parliament platform.

Illuminating New Solutions and Programmatic Innovations For Resilient Spaces (INSPIRES) is a nationwide initiative aimed at gathering data on the indicators for shrinking civic space across Nigeria, for an effective early warning predictive system to forecast civic shifts. This is towards providing actionable, time-sensitive mitigation strategies.

The INSPIRES Project utilized a mixed methodology that blended a nationwide survey to assess the state of Nigeria’s Civic Space and grassroots- based tracking of events of civic space violation between May and September.

Objectives Of The Project

1. To gather data on the indicators for shrinking civic space across the 36 states and FCT, Abuja, Nigeria, for an effective early warning predictive system to forecast civic shifts towards providing actionable, time-sensitive mitigation strategies.
2. To conduct surveys across the 36 states, including FCT, Abuja towards gathering data from grassroots and marginalized communities to comparatively analyze the effect of the different government policies and actions on citizen participation.
3. To test the proposition that machine learning could potentially predict the civic spaces shifts more effectively than traditional approaches with the gathered data.
4. To share local information relating to civic space with local CSOs towards shared mitigative action planning.