Stears Elections is an open data project designed to organise all of Nigeria’s election data. In 2019, Stears built Nigeria’s first real-time election database and became a choice destination for millions of Nigerians who wanted trusted results. The company has since expanded its data coverage to become more granular. Heading into Nigeria’s 2023 elections, Stears will continue expanding its ability to monitor, analyse and visualise the elections as it aggregates more data.
Stears has taken an additive approach to participating in Nigeria’s election, using first-of-its-kind mapping data to visualise voting regions. Among many firsts, Stears is proud to have created the only existing map of constituency boundaries for the House of Representatives and State Houses of Assembly. Stears’ data & engineering teams deployed complex data processing techniques to make this possible.
“Creating the boundaries for State Houses of Assembly constituencies has proved even more challenging because there is less information from the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) about the constituency composition. However, the team is committed to being the first to complete and release this geospatial data set for Nigeria in January,” says Hannah Kates, who led this open data effort. Hannah is an experienced data scientist and product manager, previously responsible for a portfolio of public data explorer tools at the New York City Department of City Planning.
From election observers who want first to objectively monitor election dynamics to the Nigerian electorate —all 94 million of them— Stears Elections is a valuable data & insights tool. With young people making up over 71 per cent of the 12 million newly printed PVCs, there is an unprecedented information gap that Stears Elections will fill.
“This first version of Stears Elections was designed to allow voters find the candidates vying for their votes. With data on candidates from the Presidential elections down to the State Houses of Assembly, we’ve made it possible for users to sign up to monitor specific races. There is no existing product in the market that allows for this level of granularity,” explains Preston Ideh, Stears CEO.
He added, “If all politics is local, then the granularity of Stears Elections matters when filling the information gap. As an organisation with rich data expertise and familiarity visualising large data sets, Stears is uniquely placed to organise election data in a useful, easy-to-consume format.”
Historically, Nigeria’s voter turnout has been on the low side. In 2019, the turnout was only 36%, indicating that many Nigerians did not engage in selecting their political leaders. Many governorship elections recorded a turnout of 20% or less, with off-cycle elections like the Anambra gubernatorial elections in 2021 and the Lagos East Senate by-election in 2020 coming down as low as 10%.
However, recent polling data and campaign momentum suggest that voter turnout could be higher in this election. Even a modest change could have significant consequences for the final results. Stears Elections hopes to increase participation in the 2023 elections by making it easy to access critical election data.
The ability to create a distinctive data product is in no small part due to the multidisciplinary nature of the team. Stears combines expertise across data collection, storage, engineering and visualisation, with deep technical expertise and an understanding of Nigeria’s political economy and demographic dynamics. The leadership and background of Stears’ four founders – Michael Famoroti, an economist; Bode Ogunlana, a software engineer; Abdul Abdulrahim, a data scientist and Preston Ideh, the CEO, all graduates of the London School of Economics and the University of Oxford, makes this kind of diverse team possible.
Between now and the elections, Stears will launch newer versions of the datasite to add more data and features.
Stears recently closed a seed round of $3.3m led by MaC Venture Capital with participation from Serena Ventures, Melo 7 Tech Partners, Omidyar Group’s Luminate Fund, Cascador and Hoaq Club.
