October 2018-May 2019

Summary
Niger Delta Watch 2019 is a citizen-led elections observation project reporting on the 2019 Nigerian presidential and governorship elections.
The project focuses on the states of Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta, and Akwa Ibom. Niger Delta Watch 2019 is a joint initiative of SDN and the Civil Society Situation Room (CSSR). SDN has conducted extensive research on political and electoral dynamics in the Niger Delta, and Niger Delta Watch 2019 is the latest iteration of previous election observation work carried out by SDN, including during the 2011 and 2015 election cycles.
Aims
The goal of Niger Delta Watch 2019 is to generate accurate information on the election campaign as it unfolds, for the benefit of the Nigerian government, Nigerian electoral agencies, and journalists, researchers, civil society organisations, and others working to support democracy in Nigeria.
Key activities
In November and December 2018, we trained nearly 100 citizen Election Observers, Social Media Analysts and Data Analysts as project team members to take part in Niger Delta Watch 2019. They are based across the Niger Delta, and submit incident reports and other analysis on events which relate to a number of risk areas identified as relevant to the Niger Delta. Each week we produce a report describing and analysing these events in our four focus states of Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta and Akwa Ibom. We publish these reports online, and then hold briefings with government officials, journalists, diplomats, civil society organisations, and others working to make the Nigerian elections a success. We are also organising a series of radio shows on local stations so members of the public can access the information we produce.
Context
The Nigerian Presidential election is scheduled to take place in February 2019. There will also be elections for the key role of State Governor in many of Nigeria’s 36 states.Unfortunately, previous elections in Nigeria have seen trouble in the form of electoral fraud and violence. These problems have been acute in the Niger Delta, which has very complex politics linked to its status as the source of Nigeria’s oil wealth. However, Nigeria’s 2015 election was a key milestone. It saw an incumbent President relinquish power via the ballot box for the first time since Nigeria’s return to democracy in 1999.
This project aims to support this progress by providing information to agencies such as Nigeria’s Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to monitor any challenges with the elections as they unfold. This will help them to respond to issues on the ground and deliver a fair and safe election. We hope the reports will also be a useful source of information to journalists, human rights and election observers, and others working to support Nigeria’s election processes.
The project will also report on good practice, to highlight where lessons can be learnt to support further consolidation of democracy in Nigeria.
Published: 11.12.2019
Project results
The project increased the capacity of civil society organisations in Rivers, Bayelsa, Delta and Akwa Ibom through the completion of a series of training initiatives relevant to specific project roles. This included in particular a week of workshops in November 2018, which generated a cohort of 100 citizen Election Observers, Data Analysts and Social Media Analysts to ensure the project could generate the information necessary for its reporting. The capacity building was led by the project’s specialist partner organisations, which have significant international expertise. Election observer and social media training was led by Democracy Reporting International (DRI), an NGO focused on electoral issues and democracy promotion, while training on data management and analysis using the Tableau software package was led by the Armed Conflict Location & Event Database (ACLED), a leading academic political violence monitoring project.
SDN produced extensive written documentation of the conduct of the 2019 elections in the Niger Delta, amounting to approximately 50,000+ words of original reporting and analysis. This was published in 15 public weekly editions of the reports (Niger Delta Watch #1 – #15), as well as several shorter bespoke email and other briefings for members of the diplomatic community to comment on urgent issues. SDN’s final election assessment is a 15,000-word report on the elections, which is undergoing full graphic design and will be published in July 2019. SDN’s final project database includes nearly 700 cleaned and coded rows of original incident data, structured according to a series of bespoke election indicators designed as part of the project in conjunction with ACLED and DRI.
Niger Delta Watch’s original reporting has been disseminated in a number of ways:
- Via publication on SDN’s election website at https://www.stakeholderdemocracy.org/elections2019/.
- Directly to targeted stakeholders via a mailing list.
- In a series of public webinars.
- As the basis for a series of in-person briefings held in Akwa Ibom, Bayelsa, Delta, and Rivers States with key stakeholders.
- In person in London, Abuja and Port Harcourt, where SDN staff have held meetings with representatives from the British Foreign Office and NGOs to update them on the situation.
- As the basis for a series of radio programmes broadcast to the public on election-related issues.
- As raw project data, which has been provided to. ACLED focuses on political violence and Niger Delta Watch data has been included in its public database, which is updated weekly (note that although the source is cited as Niger Delta Watch, in agreement with ACLED the data has been anonymised for security reasons).
Funder

Partner
