Cheikh Fall

Cheikh Fall is the Senegalese web-activist, civic-tech founder, and co-founder and President since November 2015 of AfricTivistes — the Dakar-headquartered pan-African civil-society network at the intersection of digital technology and democracy that anchors the corpus's Francophone-West-Africa and pan-African coverage (see Person entry). He is tracked here as a Voice because his sustained on-record output — the AfricTivistes-Democracy Reporting International chatbot-reliability study on the 17 November 2024 Senegalese legislative elections (published 22 April 2025) that installs the institutional position Fall carries as President that generative-AI chatbots "cannot be considered entirely reliable sources of electoral information" during election periods; the 8 April 2024 Ouestaf News long-form French-language interview carrying the densest single press treatment of his digital-sovereignty, e-citoyen, data-protection, and local-versus-foreign-expertise framings; the 26 September 2024 FIFAfrica24 opening-ceremony keynote at the 11th Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa held for the first time in Dakar; the 26 June 2025 launch of the Farafina platform as the continent's first online one-stop civic-tech platform on African elections, built across more than twelve months of data collection and aggregation from 54 African countries; the parallel Election Civic Tech Fund grant programme he runs as President; the Heinrich Böll Stiftung Senegal: If I don't know, I ask – if I know, I share long-form feature (22 September 2021) anchoring the canonical chronology of his civic-tech work since 2010; and the Radio-Canada Cheikh Fall rêve l'Afrique feature anchoring his "soft revolution" framing of African digital democracy — carries the working civil-society argument that generative AI in African electoral processes must be subject to systematic empirical reliability testing rather than left to platform self-assessment, that digital sovereignty is a political-will question before it is a technical one, and that connected e-citoyens equipped with civic-tech tooling reorient the power balance with the state in ways that the state itself resists.

He is the corpus's first Senegalese and first Francophone-West-African Voice — complementing the Anglophone-West-African internet-shutdowns register the corpus tracks through voice-felicia-anthonio at Access Now (Ghanaian, Accra-based, bilingual English / French operational register across the #KeepItOn coalition's Anglophone-and-Francophone pan-African footprint), the Anglophone-Nigerian digital-inclusion register the corpus tracks through voice-gbenga-sesan at Paradigm Initiative, the Kenyan strategic-litigation register the corpus tracks through voice-mercy-mutemi, and the Southern African multilateral-elder register the corpus tracks through voice-anriette-esterhuysen at APC. Fall's distinctive register is the civic-tech-founder-and-platform-president sub-type — structurally distinct from the litigators (Cori Crider, Mercy Mutemi), the framework authors (Joy Buolamwini, Sasha Costanza-Chock), the lawyer-organiser-and-multilateral-body register (Apar Gupta), the coalition-coordinator-and-podcast-host register (Felicia Anthonio), and the multilateral-elder-and-pan-African-convener register (Anriette Esterhuysen). His public output runs through the platforms his organisation builds and the empirical research it publishes on generative AI in elections, not through litigation, framework authorship, or multilateral-body keynotes.

Signature framings

Five framings recur across Fall's public output and the institutional positions he carries as AfricTivistes President.

• "Chatbots cannot be considered entirely reliable sources of electoral information" — generative-AI in African elections. This is the institutional position Fall carries as President of AfricTivistes from the joint AfricTivistes-Democracy Reporting International chatbot-reliability study (published 22 April 2025; testing conducted October 2024) — the most-cited single African-civil-society empirical statement on generative-AI reliability in electoral contexts. The study tested five major chatbots (Microsoft Copilot, Google Gemini, OpenAI ChatGPT-4o, OpenAI ChatGPT-4omini, and Anthropic Claude) in Wolof and French against the 17 November 2024 Senegalese legislative elections under a three-criteria evaluation framework (accuracy, consistency, completeness), and found that all five share an "inability to integrate real-time updates of the Senegalese political context" and that "some chatbots generate erroneous responses with a high degree of confidence". The institutional call — "it is therefore essential for citizens, journalists and civil society actors to systematically verify the information obtained through these tools by cross-referencing it with recognised official and journalistic sources" — installs into the African civil-society register the working argument that generative-AI use in African electoral processes requires systematic empirical reliability testing and a fact-checking discipline rather than platform self-assessment, and is paired with the forward-looking commitment that "AfricTivistes and its partners will continue to work towards a more informed and enlightened use of digital tools for artificial intelligence becomes a lever for electoral transparency".
• "The State has the means... but neither the ambition nor the courage" — digital sovereignty as political will, not technical capacity. Fall's most-cited framing on state technology policy is the line he gave to Ouestaf News on 8 April 2024 — "L'État a les moyens de protéger les données personnelles, mais il n'a ni l'ambition ni le courage de le faire" (the state has the means to protect personal data, but it has neither the ambition nor the courage to do so) — paired with the diagnosis that this is "un manque de volonté politique" (a lack of political will) and the structural framing "Le Sénégal n'a pas les possibilités d'assumer sa souveraineté numérique. Mais de la même manière que chaque État veut assurer sa souveraineté militaire, économique, alimentaire, il nous faut le vouloir pour atteindre cette souveraineté numérique" (Senegal does not have the means to assume its digital sovereignty; but in the same way that every state wants to ensure its military, economic, and food sovereignty, we must want to reach this digital sovereignty). The Diamniadio Data Center framing in the same interview — "Le Data Center ne change rien. Il faut qu'il y ait d'abord une volonté, une vision politique capable d'accompagner cela. L'infrastructure seule ne sert absolument à rien" (the Data Center changes nothing; there must first be a political will, a political vision capable of accompanying it; infrastructure alone serves absolutely nothing) — is the operational corollary. The framings carry the working argument that the African digital-sovereignty question is a political-will question before it is a technical-capacity question and the civil-society case against the conflation of infrastructure investment with sovereignty.
• "E-citoyens with full consciousness of their citizenship... the State is no longer strong" — connected citizenship as a power-balance shift. Fall's most-cited framing on the civil-society stakes of digital citizenship is the line he gave to Ouestaf News — "si les citoyens et les citoyennes connectés, les e-citoyens ont une pleine conscience de leur citoyenneté et de leur pouvoir en termes de droits et de devoirs, l'État n'est plus fort. Ce sont les citoyens qui vont avoir la force. Et nos États n'aiment pas ça !" (if connected citizens, the e-citoyens, have a full consciousness of their citizenship and their power in terms of rights and duties, the State is no longer strong; it is the citizens who will have the strength; and our States do not like that!) — paired with the diagnostic framing "un citoyen protégé, outillé, en pleine conscience de sa citoyenneté, va poser des problèmes à l'État" (a protected, equipped citizen, in full consciousness of citizenship, will cause problems for the State) and the wider framing "plus la population est dans l'ignorance, plus l'État a la possibilité de pouvoir accomplir des forfaitures" (the more the population is in ignorance, the more the State has the possibility of committing malfeasance). The framing has anchored Fall's civic-tech-for-democracy work since the 2010 Citoyen au Sénégal participatory platform, through the #Sunu2012 citizen-election-monitoring platform, and into the 2025 Farafina platform's framing of civil-society and citizen-observer tooling as load-bearing on electoral integrity.
• "They prefer foreigners to local expertise" — the local-expertise sovereignty argument. Fall's most-cited framing on the political economy of African digital sovereignty is the Ouestaf line "il préfère confier de telles activités à un étranger plutôt qu'à un Sénégalais simplement parce qu'il ne fait pas confiance à l'expertise locale" (the State prefers to entrust such activities to a foreigner rather than to a Senegalese simply because it does not trust local expertise) — paired with the operational claim that "au niveau national, on a un millier de personnes qui ont la capacité de créer un système qui fonctionne" (at the national level, we have a thousand people with the capacity to create a system that works). The framing is the conceptual centre of Fall's argument that African digital sovereignty cannot run through foreign-vendor procurement and that the civic-tech ecosystem AfricTivistes builds — including the Farafina platform — is the institutional answer to the foreign-dependence problem.
• "Soft revolution" — civic technology as the engine of democratic consolidation in Africa. Fall's longest-running and most-cited framing of the civic-tech-for-democracy register is the line Radio-Canada records as "soft revolution" enabled by software — the framing he carried out of the 2010 Citoyen au Sénégal participatory platform and the 2012 #Sunu2012 (Wolof for "Our 2012") election-monitoring platform that equipped hundreds of young Senegalese with mobile phones at polling stations and published preliminary results by 9 p.m. on election day, and that AfricTivistes records as having directly informed President Wade's concession call. The framing was cited in the 2016 Diakonia Prize awarded by the Swedish humanitarian organisation Diakonia for "democratic consolidation in Africa through information and communication technologies", and it underwrites the post-2015 AfricTivistes platform model that extends from the Sunu2012 prototype across the analogous Beninese (#Vote229), Burkinabé (#Lwili), and Ghanaian (#GhanaVote) citizen-monitoring initiatives and into the present-day Farafina platform and the Election Civic Tech Fund grant programme.

Public output and venues

Fall's public-facing work runs through five overlapping channels.

• AfricTivistes-published empirical research on AI in African elections. Fall's signature institutional output on AI is the AfricTivistes-Democracy Reporting International joint study published as AI in Elections and the challenge to information integrity on 22 April 2025 — the testing of Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT-4o, ChatGPT-4omini, and Claude in Wolof and French against the 17 November 2024 Senegalese legislative elections under an accuracy / consistency / completeness evaluation framework. The institutional findings — "chatbots cannot be considered entirely reliable sources of electoral information" during election periods, the diagnostic that all five tested chatbots share an "inability to integrate real-time updates of the Senegalese political context", and the warning that "some chatbots generate erroneous responses with a high degree of confidence" — are the most-cited single African-civil-society empirical statement on generative-AI reliability in electoral contexts and the substantive basis for the wider AfricTivistes position on AI-and-elections that Fall carries as President into the FIFAfrica24 opening keynote and the Farafina platform's design rationale.
• Civic-tech platform-building under AfricTivistes presidency. Fall's signature output as platform-builder runs from the 2010 launch of Citoyen au Sénégal — Senegal's first citizen-journalism web platform — through the 2012 #Sunu2012 election-monitoring platform launched from June 2011 for the February-March 2012 Senegalese presidential election, into the 2025 Farafina platform launch on 26 June 2025 as the continent's first online one-stop civic-tech platform on African elections and electoral processes — built across more than twelve months of data collection, processing and aggregation from 54 African countries and catalogues demographic data, electoral systems, and legal-electoral frameworks for civil society organisations, citizen observers, electoral authorities, political actors, and international partners. The parallel African Election Civic Tech Fund — funding twelve civic-tech projects for electoral engagement — is the institutional vehicle through which Fall extends the platform-building register into the wider continent's civic-tech ecosystem.
• Long-form French-language interview register. Fall's most-cited single long-form interview is the Ouestaf News Cheikh Fall, président Africtivistes : le Sénégal "manque d'ambition", mais peut "assurer la protection des données personnelles" (8 April 2024) — the long-form interview anchor for his digital-sovereignty, e-citoyen, data-protection, and local-versus-foreign-expertise framings, conducted in the frame of the West African Foundation for the Media (MFWA) and Co-Develop journalism fellowship on Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). The Heinrich Böll Stiftung Senegal: If I don't know, I ask – if I know, I share (22 September 2021) carries the densest single secondary-source treatment of the post-2007 politicisation, the #Sunu2012 deployment, the AfricTivistes founding chronology, and the "200 cyber-activists from 35 different countries" framing of the founding network; and the Radio-Canada Cheikh Fall rêve l'Afrique feature carries the "soft revolution" framing of the African digital-democracy movement.
• FIFAfrica and pan-African convening keynote register. Fall's signature speaker register runs through the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa convening platform — most centrally his 26 September 2024 FIFAfrica24 opening-ceremony keynote as President of AfricTivistes at the 11th Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa held in Dakar from 25 to 27 September 2024, the first time the continent's flagship internet-freedom convening was hosted in Senegal. The keynote anchored AfricTivistes's framing of the forum as a platform for reflection on "the many contemporary challenges facing the African continent through its states and its Internet users".
• Awards, recognition, and bilingual capacity-building. The institutional recognitions Fall has accumulated frame the public-output register at standing-body scale: the 2016 Diakonia Prize awarded by the Swedish humanitarian organisation Diakonia at AFRICAPACITES 2016 in Burkina Faso for "democratic consolidation in Africa through information and communication technologies"; the 2013 Reporters Without Borders Net-citoyen Prize nomination, the 2014 Deutsche Welle "Best Online of Activism" nomination, the 2014 membership of UNESCO's "Youth Civic Engagement" expert group, and the 2019 Intelligences Magazine ranking among the fifty most influential young people in Senegal. Alongside the awards Fall runs a sustained bilingual French / English capacity-building register — data-journalism training programmes deployed in Senegal, Guinea, Niger, and Burkina Faso — that anchors the AfricTivistes pipeline through which French-language African civil-society, journalists, and citizen-organisers feed into the continent's wider pan-African digital-rights and digital-democracy register.

Organisational vehicles

Fall's public output runs through one principal organisational vehicle and three convening platforms. AfricTivistes, where he has served as co-founder and President since November 2015, is the institutional anchor of his output: the Dakar-headquartered pan-African civil-society network at the intersection of digital technology and democracy through whose Election Observatory, Farafina platform, and joint research with Democracy Reporting International his AI-and-elections and electoral-integrity register reaches international audiences. Beyond AfricTivistes, the three principal convening platforms through which his output reaches pan-African audiences are the Forum on Internet Freedom in Africa (FIFAfrica) — most centrally the 2024 Dakar edition that AfricTivistes hosted and Fall opened — the Farafina platform and parallel African Election Civic Tech Fund civic-tech-for-elections institutional layer, and the joint AfricTivistes-Democracy Reporting International AI-in-elections research partnership through which the institutional position on generative-AI reliability in African electoral processes is published.

Why this is a Voice entry

A Voice entry is created here, rather than additional structure on the Person entry, because Fall's public output is itself the load-bearing object the corpus needs to track: the working civil-society framing of generative AI in African electoral processes — chatbots cannot be considered reliable sources of electoral information during election periods; digital sovereignty is a political-will question before it is a technical-capacity one; connected e-citoyens equipped with civic-tech tooling reorient the power balance with the state; foreign-vendor procurement undermines African digital sovereignty; civic technology is the engine of African democratic consolidation — is the language he has installed across the AfricTivistes-Democracy Reporting International research partnership, the Farafina platform launch, the FIFAfrica24 opening keynote, the Ouestaf and Heinrich Böll long-form interview register, and the Radio-Canada "soft revolution" feature. The corpus's African voice register — which had been tracked from the Anglophone-West-African internet-shutdowns side through voice-felicia-anthonio, from the Anglophone-Nigerian digital-inclusion side through voice-gbenga-sesan, from the Kenyan strategic-litigation side through voice-mercy-mutemi, and from the Southern African multilateral-elder side through voice-anriette-esterhuysen — carries no other Senegalese voice, no other Francophone-West-African voice, and no other civic-tech-founder-and-platform-president voice on the AI-and-elections / electoral-information-integrity register until now. Affiliation and biographical structure are recorded on the linked Person entry per the corpus's Person/Voice split.