April 19th, 2007

Over the past few weeks Ken Banks has been helping a Nigerian NGO work with mobiles to set up an election monitoring system for the Presidential Elections. They are using his FrontlineSMS system.

This is the accompanying press release:
The Network of Mobile Election Monitors of Nigeria(NMEM) is set to activate its teaming numbers of volunteers spread through out the country to monitor and evaluate the effectives of the upcoming presidential pools on the 21st April 2007 in Nigeria. Organized by Human Emancipation Lead Project (HELP) Foundation with technical support from Ken Banks, http://www.frontlinesms.kiwanja.net/.

NMEM will use the mobile phone and the network of volunteer to reach every nook and crannies of the country wherever there is a GSM network (Presently over 30 million Nigerians subscribes to the services of the three major GSM operators).
Dressed as ordinary citizens and themselves participants in the election process, the volunteers are to SMS their observations to the SMS coalition hub on 0808-4032739. Since the volunteers do not necessarily know each other, data from more than one volunteer in each area will be used to check for accuracy of report.
The SMS hub shall be open up till Monday 23rd April to accommodate report from areas where there were network failures as experienced in the trial exercise during the gubernatorial elections on the 14 April 2007

The purpose of this project is to involve over 30million Nigeria armed with mobile phones in the all important process of electing the next president of Nigeria.

For further information, please visit the project website at www.mobilemonitors.org.

An interview with Ken and Mongabay.com is available at http://news.mongabay.com/2007/0416-banks_interview.html

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