Wardchat Corporation has launched the Wardchat app, which is a smart, non-partisan social network aimed at digitizing the electoral space, connecting, and building relationships among voters at the Ward, Local Government, and State levels in Nigeria.
Ten (10) years from the idea’s conception is the official launch of the Wardchat app was held on the 8th of April at Four Points by Sheraton, Lagos.
The Social Network has custom features built on Nigeria’s electoral structure covering 36 states and the FCT, 774 Local Governments, 8802 wards, and over 176,000 polling units. This technology has been developed to support, at the minimum, a community of 10 million registered Nigerian voters to relate, debate, trade, and most importantly influence each other to participate in the electoral process either as voters or candidates. It is the first to serve a niche electoral community, starting with Nigeria’s community of over a 73 million registered voters.
A press question and answer session with the Wardchat country lead, Kunle Lawal.
Question: ‘With the upswing of tech apps in Nigeria, what sets Wardchat apart?’
Answer: ‘Most of the tech apps coming into the market are fintech, Mobility, Insurtech or Edtech while Wardchat is the only custom-built tech app aimed at digitizing the electoral space for proximal relationships using the smallest electoral unit as a determinant during registration’.
‘We play in the social media space where we have the foreign big techs like Facebook, Twitter, and Opera News Hub. But what makes us different is the niche market we would be serving, which is Nigeria’s electoral community of over 73 million registered voters and over 120 million above voting age, our features are built for Nigeria’s electoral structure which isn’t an afterthought.’
‘As of today, only Wardchat creates connections by matching user’s electoral profiles thereby helping to foster engagement among voters that lead to better electoral outcomes, targeted audience conversations, and ward-centric conversations.’
Question: ‘What insight informed the product development process?”
Answer: ‘A major insight that informed the development of this app is realizing that every polling unit is a community of voters, and we believe this community should connect and interact as voters, no matter how dispersed they may be.’
Question: ‘How do you think the app would change the way people would vote or collect PVC for the upcoming election?’
Answer: ‘Firstly, Wardchat has been created with a long-term vision and not necessarily for the upcoming election. We are just happy this is coming at the right time for the 2023 elections for a peek into what the product can potentially become. We do not want to change the way people vote. We want to facilitate and create relationships among voters that will enable them to influence each other and collaborate for more informed electoral choices.’
‘We believe that developing rapport and trust among voters at the ward level is a critical aspect of persuasion to end voter apathy and unfriendly debates in our electoral space. Among other things, we have plans to create a feature on candidate profiling and risk assessment to enable voters to know candidates better and evaluate their choices.’
‘To aid PVC collection, we plan a geotagging of all polling units in Nigeria so it is easy for people of voting age to know the nearest polling units to them by just checking on the app. And of course, we will have our offline outreach engagements to drive voter registration and PVC collections’
Question: ‘What are your next key growth milestones for Wardchat?’
Answer: ‘This is a long journey for us and we aim to have 7million voters onboarded on the app in 5 years. That is less than 10% of the voting population so we believe it is doable. In the run-up to the 2023 elections, our target is to get to 1million sign-ups on the platform with over a 1.5million content generated.’
Question: ‘What is the App’s plan for the electoral process in the 2023 Election?’
Answer: ‘We plan to sign up a sizable number of voters that can use our amazing app features for incidence reporting, election monitoring, voter education, random polling, and political campaigns, at no cost to them. We also plan to deploy a feature that will allow users to report results from their polling units, and these will be collated and reported on a dashboard available for all users of the platform to see.’
Question: ‘What does Ward plan to do to impact local communities in Nigeria?’
Answer: ‘Our corporate social responsibility will be 100% focused at grassroot level. A great way to earn people’s trust is to cater to their welfare while also highlighting issues they are facing for government and development agency interventions through our Ward Polling Survey. We also plan offline grassroots empowerment programs to support the needy.’
