AfricTivistes campaign on AI, elections, and democratic information integrity in West Africa (2023–ongoing)

AfricTivistes launched its sustained campaign on AI, elections, and democratic information integrity in 2023, consolidating a thread that had been implicit in its elections-monitoring and civic-tech work since 2015 into an explicit civil-society campaign against AI-mediated electoral disinformation in Francophone and broader West Africa. The campaign's animating concern — that generative AI introduced a qualitatively new electoral disinformation risk that existing media-literacy and fact-checking infrastructure was not equipped to meet — anchored a multi-year sequence of research, training, platform-building, and civil-society coalition work that by 2025–2026 constituted the most operationally-developed civil-society infrastructure for AI-and-elections advocacy in the region.

Origins: the 2023 Dakar Seminar on Information and Democracy

The campaign's identifiable opening was the October 24–25, 2023 Seminar on Information and Democracy in Dakar, convened by AfricTivistes in partnership with Article 19, the Forum on Information and Democracy, Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Internet Without Borders, Amnesty International, Y'en a Marre, Raddho, and Jonction. The seminar addressed the intersection of digital technology, democracy, and citizen participation in Senegal — including misinformation prevention, the regulation of fake news, and the protection of human rights and freedom of expression online. The 2023 seminar did not yet carry an explicit AI framing, but established the civil-society coalition, the Senegalese policy audience, and the information-integrity problem definition that the campaign's subsequent AI-specific work would build on.

AHEAD Africa: the formal programme structure (2024–2027)

The campaign's formal programme structure is AHEAD Africa (Action for a Holistic Electoral Approach towards Democracy), a three-year consortium project co-funded by the European Union. AfricTivistes leads the initiative alongside Democracy Reporting International (DRI), the European Partnership for Democracy (EPD), the African Election Observation Network (AfEONET), the Electoral Support Network for Southern Africa (ESN-SA), the East and Horn of Africa Election Observer Network (E-HORN), and the West African Election Observer Network (WAEON). AHEAD Africa was softly launched on February 21, 2024 in Nairobi and formally launched on July 20, 2024 in Accra, Ghana.

The programme's operational innovation laboratory encompasses five components: Soobu (Tech4Elections), a digital-mapping tool cataloguing citizen observation and civic-tech initiatives across the continent since 2010 (the name derives from the Wolof word for "commitment, mobilisation"); Farafina, an online elections information hub; the AfEONET network supporting electoral situation rooms; a Massive Open Online Course on African electoral processes; and a grant mechanism for civic-tech projects. The AHEAD Africa structure gives the campaign a geographic reach across African Union member states, while its explicit objective of "combating misinformation and fake news" keeps the AI-disinformation focus central to all five components.

Content moderation advocacy during Senegal's 2024 political crisis

In February 2024, Senegal's government postponed the presidential election scheduled for February 25 — an unprecedented constitutional move that triggered protests and two mobile internet shutdowns. AfricTivistes responded by co-organising with CIPESA a February 8, 2024 workshop on platform accountability and content moderation in Dakar, bringing together 25 journalists, influencers, human-rights defenders, and civil-society representatives. Case studies from Nigeria and Uganda illustrated how platform content moderation disproportionately affected African-language and political content. Recommendations addressed platform transparency, multilingual terms of use, and user recourse mechanisms — positioning AfricTivistes as an interlocutor between Senegalese civil society and the global platform companies whose moderation decisions were shaping the political information environment during the crisis.

Disinformation training (October 2024)

In October 2024, AfricTivistes co-organised with the Alliance for Migration, Leadership, and Development (AMLD) a two-day Dakar workshop on Disinformation in Pre-, During, and Post-Electoral Periods, gathering 100 participants — predominantly women and young people from political circles, civil society, and the media — for structured training on "the role of artificial intelligence and emotional intelligence in politics." The workshop covered AI's potential to amplify disinformation at scale, the legal frameworks governing electoral information in Senegal, and the categorical distinctions between the forms of disinformation that circulate during election periods. The 100-participant scale and the inclusion of political-party representatives marked a shift from research-facing sessions toward mass-audience delivery of the campaign's AI-disinformation analysis.

Empirical research: chatbot reliability (April 2025)

In April 2025, AfricTivistes and DRI published a joint study assessing the reliability of five major AI chatbots — Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT-4o, ChatGPT-4omini, and Claude — as sources of electoral information, testing them on the Senegalese legislative elections of November 17, 2024. Researchers posed questions in both Wolof and French, evaluating accuracy, consistency, and completeness against official sources. The study found that no chatbot could be considered a reliable source of electoral information: none could integrate real-time political developments, and several generated "incorrect information with a high degree of confidence" — posing, in the study's assessment, "a serious risk of disinformation, especially during electoral periods." ChatGPT-4o and Claude performed best within the tested group; ChatGPT-4omini produced the highest error rates. AfricTivistes' canonical position from the study — that citizens, journalists, and civil-society actors should "systematically verify information obtained through these tools by cross-referencing it with recognised official and journalistic sources" — has shaped the broader continental conversation on AI-mediated electoral information risk.

Platform infrastructure: Farafina.tech and Soobu (2025)

The campaign's technology investment culminated in the June 26, 2025 launch of Farafina.tech in Dakar — described as "the continent's first online one-stop platform dedicated to elections and electoral processes." The platform (the name means "Africa" in Mandinka) catalogues demographic data, aggregates electoral-system information, and monitors the legal frameworks governing elections across African countries, offering reliable electoral information as a structural counter to the fragmented and AI-disinformation-susceptible information landscapes the campaign had identified. The parallel Soobu/Tech4Elections tool, running alongside AHEAD Africa's innovation laboratory, provides a searchable digital map of civic-technology and citizen-observation initiatives across the continent since 2010.

Civic tech investment: the Election Civic Tech Fund (2025)

The campaign's most financially substantial intervention is the EUR 175,000 African Election Civic Tech Fund, launched June 13, 2025, co-funded through the EU AHEAD Africa project in partnership with the Digital Democracy Initiative. The fund supports civic-technology initiatives across 14 African countries: Somalia, Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Senegal, Benin, Burkina Faso, Guinea, Chad, Cameroon, Mauritania, Niger, Mali, and Togo. Individual grants range from EUR 10,000 to EUR 25,000, with priority given to women-led organisations and youth groups (ages 18–35). On December 18, 2025, AfricTivistes announced the selection of 12 projects, including three with an explicit AI focus: MyAIFactChecker Cameroon (Brain Builders Youth Development Initiative — AI-based fact-checking), Vigilant Civic Voice (Association des blogueurs du Bénin — political misinformation monitoring), and Electoral Fact-Checking Initiative South Sudan (Excellence Foundation for South Sudan). Projected aggregate impact across the 12 projects: 15+ digital platforms, 300+ fact-checking items, 1,500+ trained individuals, and 500,000+ citizens mobilised for electoral transparency.

FIMI research: Senegal (October 2025)

On October 2, 2025, AfricTivistes presented in Dakar the first national analytical report on Foreign Information Manipulation and Interference in Senegal, produced with International IDEA (applying its global FIMI methodology) and supported by Global Affairs Canada. The multi-stakeholder event convened policymakers, diplomats, journalists, researchers, the Canadian Embassy, the European External Action Service, Ministries of Communication from Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire, and Code for Africa. The Senegal report is the first in a planned series of four national consultations; subsequent editions target Côte d'Ivoire, North Macedonia, and Moldova, positioning AfricTivistes as a node in a global comparative research project on foreign electoral interference while anchoring its deepest empirical work on the Senegalese context.

Significance in the corpus

The AfricTivistes campaign is the corpus's first West Africa campaign entity on AI-mediated electoral disinformation and the first Francophone Africa campaign entity on this problem area. It is structurally distinct from the corpus's other AI-accountability campaigns — Access Now's #BanBS coalition is a biometric-surveillance rights-enforcement campaign; the AlgoRace campaign in Spain targets racial discrimination in deployed AI systems — in focusing on generative AI's effect on the electoral information environment specifically, and in doing so from a civic-tech-infrastructure-building posture: building platforms (Farafina.tech, Soobu), funding grantees, running trainings, and producing empirical studies rather than litigating or seeking legislative bans. Its convening of Y'en a Marre, the Association des blogueurs du Bénin, and political-party representatives for AI-disinformation training marks a movement-building dimension — transferring the AI-and-elections analysis from the AfricTivistes research register into political and social-movement networks — that distinguishes it from purely research-facing equivalents.