By Adedapo Adesanya
A company known as Wardchat Nigeria has launched a social network built to digitize the electoral community, connecting voters with the same electoral profiles across the country by building relationships among voters at the ward, local government and state levels.
The social network has custom features built on Nigeria’s electoral structure covering 36 states and the FCT, 774 Local Governments, 8802 wards and over 176,000 polling units.
According to the developers, this technology has been developed to support, at the minimum, a community of 10 million registered Nigerian voters to relate, debate, trade and most importantly influence each other to participate in the electoral process either as voters or candidates.
It is the first to serve a niche electoral community, starting with Nigeria’s community of over 73 million registered voters.
First conceived in 2012, the Wardchat idea to connect voters at ward levels via social networking technology failed due to a lack of app development expertise in Nigeria as the app world was still emerging at the time.
Headway was made in 2020 when the team started the development of the Minimum-Viable-Product (MVP); a Web-based app based on the technology available at the time.
By June 2021 there was a rollout of the MVP which received great feedback and surpassed the team’s expectations: 1,600 voters onboarded on the Web-based app, 12,400 active users, 112,788 page views and over 24,000 user-generated content.
October 2021 saw the development of the IOS and Android App and after 10 years, the Wardchat app was launched on April 8 following the raise of an undisclosed amount from an angel investor.
This funding, apart from boosting the team’s confidence in the viability of the app in the long term, is also currently driving the successful development and continuous improvement of the app, infrastructural upgrade, marketing, and promotions.
As a social platform evolving in the tech space, the app’s usage has been packed with features which are easily operatable and user friendly.
Some of the custom features include – The Feeds for sharing content and connecting with fellow voters; Seamless Multi-Share which enables engaging and educative knowledge sharing among voters; Chat for messaging fellow voters as well as Electoral & Origin Switch – a switch button which enables users to flip between Electoral and Origin Feeds.
