Yiaga’s ₦13 million award will support development of Pawavox’s Election GPT, a proposed tool for documenting Nigeria’s 2027 elections, while the project’s co-founder says the prize cannot cover observer deployment and protection across the country.
Yiaga announced Oct. 15 that Election GPT won the Judges’ Choice award in the Election Observation and Data category at its 2026 AI and Democracy Forum Sandbox. The award also includes technical support to develop and scale the project ahead of the general elections.
The planned system would let observers submit audio and video reports with information about where and when they were recorded, along with a cryptographic signature. Yiaga says a dashboard would make the reports searchable. A proposed connection to TrueMedia would allow command centers to check public clips and receive a likelihood flag and confidence score for human review. The screening feature is not described as a final determination of whether a video is authentic or manipulated.
Jason Omu, Pawavox’s co-founder, told BusinessDay the prize would support a nine-month operational plan covering infrastructure, observer coordination and archiving after the election. He said the money would not cover independently organizing and protecting observers at the 176,000 polling units he cited.
BusinessDay reported that Omu said the app can hash evidence on a device, save it locally without an internet connection and synchronize it when service returns. He also described the in-app storage as encrypted and hidden and said the software is open source.
Omu told BusinessDay that Pawavox would collect reports about events during voting, complementing the Independent National Electoral Commission’s IReV portal, which he characterized as focused on publishing final polling-unit result sheets. He said the project is intended to address the volume of observer reports, synthetic media and the work involved in reviewing submissions. Yiaga’s award announcement does not say the commission has adopted the tool.
The commission’s calendar lists the presidential and National Assembly election for Jan. 16, 2027, and the governorship and State House of Assembly election for Feb. 6, 2027.
