Artificial Intelligence for Electoral Actors in Africa: Executive Workshop in Senegal

In collaboration with Senegal’s Direction Générale des Elections, International IDEA has invited representatives from regional electoral management bodies (EMBs) and civil society to share key insights into the role of emerging technologies African electoral contexts. The sessions aim to build crucial AI literacy in electoral institutions and open discussions on the context-specific regulatory and ethical considerations that are crucial prerequisites to AI implementation. 

The workshop curriculum builds upon International IDEA’s report on AI for Electoral Management, with each session delving into a key theme:

1. Basics of AI, introducing the technical foundations of AI systems and how they are integrated into existing work across different sectors;
2. AI Ethics and Human Rights, examining how AI interacts with democratic values, ethics, and human rights throughout the AI lifecycle. Including different sources of bias and who gets impacted;
3. AI and Electoral Management, exploring how AI can be, and already is, used for different functions in electoral administration, including its practical implementation and possible implications for democracy;
4. Political Actors, Campaigns, and AI, identifying how AI is used by different actors in the larger electoral context and how use-cases may impact entire election cycles;
5. Legislation and Regulation, taking a context-specific look at how electoral AI fits national, regional, and international regulation.

To ensure the mutual exchange of practices and knowledge, panels throughout the event open for speakers from EMBs and civil society organizations to highlight real-world experiences and examples of electoral AI throughout. The panel topics include:

• Adoption of AI for Electoral Management and its Challenges
• AI Challenges in the Context of Elections and Mitigation Strategies

This final workshop is the culmination of a year-long project, where International IDEA has convened stakeholders from EMBs, civil society, and the media in different regional clusters to strengthen institutional knowledge and preparedness of AI in elections. Highlighting insights from different stakeholders in the electoral context illustrates the multifaceted and ubiquitous impact of AI in society, which empowers institutional resilience to adverse effects, capacity to utilize benefits of the technology, and ability to respond to its usage by other actors. 

Senior delegates from over ten countries in the region will be representing their national EMBs at the event. The executive workshop will be conducted in French, with a majority of the participating EMBs being francophone. In April of this year, IDEA hosted a corresponding event in collaboration with the South African Electoral Commission, inviting representatives from EMBs in anglophone and lusophone countries to Johannesburg, South Africa. 

In Dakar, regional and Pan-African civil society organizations (CSOs) who work at the intersection of digital issues in democratic societies are participating in the workshop to contribute vital expertise on the current state of AI in the Africa and share how AI has impacted their work. The represented organizations include Code for Africa (CfA), Senegal Vote, AfricTivistes, Media Foundation for West Africa (MAWA), CIPESA, Observatoire Ivoirien des Droits de l’Homme (OIDH), West Africa Election Observers Network (WAEON), Paradigm Initiative, The Africa Women Journalism Project, ECONEC-RESAO, and the Electoral Institute for Sustainable Democracy in Africa (EISA).

Read more about IDEA’s AI for Electoral Actors project and the previous workshops in Kuala Lumpur, Tirana, Johannesburg, and Panama city here. For more information on the project, access the related article series and podcast series.