[Guest post by Galya Ruffer, J.D., Ph.D., Director, Center for Forced Migration Studies at the Buffet Center, Northwestern University, Evanston, IL. Galya lead a team deployment for the recent Democratic Republic of Congo.]

On November 28th, 2011 crowds assembled at 62,000 polling stations to elect DR Congo’s fifth president in the country’s first independently administered presidential elections since independence in 1960.

Getting off to a late start, just three months before the elections, Center for Forced Migration Studies at Northwestern University (CFMS) organized a group of voluntary partners comprised of humanitarian, civil society and human rights organizations to report on the elections. With Ushahidi’s past record of difficulty deploying to the Congo given it’s size (as large as Western Europe), lack of infrastructure and limited electricity and access to technology, the late start and lack of funds posed a major challenge. Therefore, our first decision was to limit the deployment to focus on the hotbed areas for violence: North and South Kivu in the east and the main opposition candidate’s stronghold, Kinshasa.

Technology had improved considerably since 2006 with most people having cell phones and greater access to wireless. On the other hand, the remote areas most sensitive to violence and election fraud are the ones without cell service and electricity. Thus, many of the same challenges remained. Knowing all these challenges, we still decided that deployment would be useful since many organizations are looking to crisis mapping to assist in combating the ongoing insecurity in eastern Congo and massive sexual violence. We could all learn from the experience. The site went live one week before the elections, on November 18th, reporting in French and English.

Organizing Networks and Teams

Through the international partners, a U.S. based diaspora group, RDC2XTE, seeking an alternative vision for DRC through supportive actions to improve accountability and advancement, and our own contacts, we created a network of local independent observers and media sources based in Bukavu and Goma in the eastern Congo and Kinshasa to continuously report back what they were witnessing at various polling stations.

One of our main dedicated partners in the east, the Institute for War and Peace Reporting, trained and organized local women journalists to SMS or email direct reports. A second dedicated partner, Collectif D’Actions Pour La Defense Des Droits Humains (CADDHOM), a local NGO focusing on a wide range of programs concerning human rights, was an official partner of the CENI (the National Election Commission) deploying 200 monitors in South Kivu. CADDHOM sent us reports via email and SMS as they received phone calls and SMS from their official field observers. I also accompanied the executive director of CADDOM, Pasteur Joseph on election day to observe the elections.

A third dedicated partner was Catholic Agency for Overseas Development (CAFOD), who organized to station a volunteer in Kinshasa to receive reports from the 30,0000 network of Catholic Bishop monitors in the field. Although in contact with the EU monitoring team, there were no actual exchanges of information and the Carter center did not respond to emails.

We provided all partners with training material and produced post card sized printouts with SMS instructions. I only arrived on the ground on November 25th, but used my time there to meet with local partners none of whom, even though they had received all my materials before hand, had actually visited the site. Internet access is simply too complicated to spend time trying to view a site that takes hours to access. On the other hand, once I arrived and installed the local SIM cards, the Android phones with SMSSync worked perfectly. In fact, since I put the SIM cards on roaming, they work even here in Chicago.

Election Day, SMS Blocked and Lessons Learned

Even with the late start, once the elections got underway we began to receive reports via SMS and email. But then a major glitch came when the government shut down the whole SMS network on December 4th due to concerns of impending violence with the announcement of the election results scheduled for December 6th. Our independent deployment hit a major roadblock between the block on SMS and evacuation of internationals from Kinshasa. I was scheduled to fly to Kinshasa on December 5th, but could not get there since flights were cancelled. All work was suspended in Kinshasa and people ordered to stay home. As CENI continued to delay announcing election results and tension mounted, the CAFOD volunteer could not send any reports. CENI finally announced Kabila’s victory on December 9th, but with growing unrest from the opposition, SMS was not restored until December 14. As soon as it was, we immediately began receiving reports from the volunteer, but these were limited to the December 13th press release that the EU confirmed the Archbishop of Kinshasa’s declaration of irregularities in the elections and media reports.

Speaking with many organizations on the ground, it became apparent that Ushahidi was not widely known in the DRC and, although I physically sat with locals and showed them the platform there was interest, no one I met with could view the site on their computers given the slow Internet connection. A local radio station in Goma. Radio Mutaani, had also set up an SMS system and gmail chat feeding into their website, but were weary of sharing data with Ushahidi given security concerns. I visited their radio station and attended a program at the University in Goma and was impressed with the level of engagement surrounding the election. Until SMS was cut off, they had a lot of activity through their gmail chat.

Without SMS the deployment shifted to media monitoring coordinated by undergraduate Liz Casano of the NorthWestern University Student team and Bharathi Ram and Leesa Astredo of the Stand-by Task Force. The SBTF was instrumental in sorting through and reporting on more than 20,000 tweets. So far, a total of 320 online reports have been uploaded from over 70 locations, comprising 55 types of incidents. There are over 150 reports still waiting to be input into the system, most likely with more to come as the team reviews additional media sources.

One of our goals going in to the deployment was to be able to provide a broad platform to link up the work of local and international monitors and amass all the reports in “real time” for use by all. We learned that this was not in the best interest of the official monitors. Given the strategic role of the National Episcopal Conference of the Congo, the country’s Catholic bishops’ council as the largest monitoring group, it was in their best interest to kept their reports secret until ready to make an official announcement which they did on December 12th. In the end, the need of human rights and humanitarian organizations to report on and respond to crisis, did not coincide with the needs of official monitoring efforts to postpone release of information until they could better assess and negotiate the political implications.

Although more time to conduct networking on the ground would have produced more buy in from humanitarian, civil and human rights organizations, it seems that in the end we might have had the same problems given the SMS and need of the largest observers to withhold their reports until the best strategic moment.

The project team is now shifting its focus to analysis. In the next three months our goal is to issue two reports on the elections. The first will examine the question of transparency that was central to the rejection of the election results by the opposition and critiques of the official monitors. The second will layer in additional data to seek to answer questions broader questions such as did NGO civics work result in reduced problems? Were their areas that had violence in 2006 but not this time? And what kinds of responses were most successful and why?