Can election outcomes be forecasted using data? Lessons from Zimbabwe’s 2023 Election

2024 promises to be a very eventful year on the African continent, with several countries holding elections. Having experienced an election in the age of AI, misinformation, and data analysis, I thought I would share briefly how the interplay of these and other disciplines may produce unexpected insights. In our case, we stumbled upon a way to forecast election outcomes at a constituency level.

Map of African countries with elections in 2024

Step 1 - Geospatial Data (Who and Where)

OpenCityLab's Mycandidate project

As part of my role as Magamba Network's Tech Projects Officer, my team and I were tasked with creating an Elections dashboard that visually informs the Electorate using infographics and maps. One of our partners in this endeavor was a team from Open Cities Lab , headed by Ella Alcock . We were to be their country partners in implementing their 'FindMyCandidate' tool. The tool helps voters view the running candidates based on their address or GPS coordinates. With new electoral boundaries in place for the election, our main task was translating the coordinates found in the delimitation report into geospatial data.