Pawavox, an election technology platform, has secured the N13 million grand prize from Yiaga Africa to deploy its cryptographic evidence infrastructure ahead of Nigeria’s 2027 general elections. The platform is designed to help election observers document incidents at polling units, authenticate photos and videos, and analyse reports in real time, amid growing concerns about misinformation and the use of AI-generated content to undermine electoral credibility. In this interview with TAOFEEK OYEDOKUN, Jason Omu, co-founder of Pawavox, explains how the technology works, how it differs from INEC’s IReV portal, the challenges of deploying it across more than 170,000 polling units and the role it could play in strengthening electoral transparency and accountability. Excerpts:
Pawavox has secured the N13 million grand prize from Yiaga Africa ahead of the 2027 elections. What problem in Nigeria’s electoral system is your technology designed to solve, and what convinced the judges that your approach could make a difference?
Pawavox solves a three-fold crisis in election monitoring: the data collection bottleneck, the threat of synthetic media (deepfakes), and analysis paralysis in situation rooms.
During an election, observers across 176,000 polling units send in thousands of reports, text, video, and audio in multiple local languages. Without a structured way to collect this, situation rooms are overwhelmed. Secondly, we are entering the AI era. When an observer submits a video of an incident today, the immediate question is: Is this real, or was it AI-generated, edited, or recycled from a past election? Finally, manually transcribing and analysing these thousands of reports takes hundreds of hours of human labour.
Pawavox automates and secures this entire pipeline. We convinced the judges by demonstrating that we can seamlessly capture reports in any local dialect, mathematically verify that the media is authentic and unedited using cryptographic hashing, and instantly analyse that data using our ElectionGPT AI to highlight critical incidents in real time.
You describe Pawavox as a cryptographic evidence infrastructure. In practical terms, how does the technology work, and how can an ordinary voter, observer or journalist use it to verify what happened at a polling unit?
For the ordinary user on the ground, it is as simple as pointing their camera and pressing record. All the complex cryptography happens in the background.
In practical terms, the moment a video or photo is captured through Pawavox, our infrastructure immediately “signs” it. It locks in the device’s unique ID, the precise geo-tag, and the exact timestamp, creating what is known as a cryptographic hash. This acts as an immutable digital seal.
If a bad actor intercepts that video and edits even one second of it, the hash breaks. Therefore, when a journalist, tribunal judge, or civil society organisation receives a Pawavox file, the mere presence of an intact cryptographic hash is mathematical proof that the evidence is 100 percent authentic. It takes the guesswork out of digital verification.
Nigeria’s electoral process already has INEC’s IReV portal for publishing polling-unit results. How does Pawavox differ from IReV, and how will your technology complement existing electoral systems rather than duplicate their functions?
INEC’s IReV portal is an excellent tool for transparency, but it is primarily designed for the end of the process – uploading the final tally sheets. However, election integrity is also about the process before the counting begins.
IReV cannot tell you if polling materials arrived on time, if voters were intimidated, or if the process was peaceful and fair throughout the day. Historically, people have relied on unverified WhatsApp or X (Twitter) videos to document these process-related issues, which leads to misinformation. Pawavox fills this gap. We complement IReV by providing irrefutable, cryptographically secured evidence of the actual voting process, ensuring that the journey to those final results was transparent and fair.
You have won the N13 million grand prize. How will the funding be deployed, what milestones do you intend to achieve before the 2027 elections, and will the amount be sufficient to deploy the technology at national scale?
As Nigerians, we are highly resourceful, but to be completely transparent, N13 million is not sufficient to independently mobilise and protect human observers across all 176,000 polling units. However, it is a powerful catalyst for our infrastructure layer.
The funding will be deployed over a strict nine-month operational roadmap. The immediate focus for Q4 is scaling our server capacity and hardening the technology infrastructure to ensure zero downtime during the January 2027 elections. The remainder of the runway will fund the mobilisation and coordination of our civic observer network, as well as post-election data archiving.
Nigeria has more than 170,000 polling units, with significant differences in internet connectivity, device access and security conditions. How will Pawavox operate in areas with poor connectivity, and how will you prevent its deployment from excluding voters or observers in underserved communities?
We built Pawavox specifically for the realities of the Nigerian landscape. We employ an “offline-first” architecture. The cryptographic hashing happens directly on the device, meaning it does not require an active internet connection to secure the evidence. If an observer is in a deep rural ward with zero connectivity, Pawavox encrypts and stores the data locally. The moment the device catches even a faint 2G network signal, it automatically syncs to our servers.
Regarding security, we built this with the safety of frontline journalists and observers in mind. Any media captured via Pawavox is stored in a highly encrypted, hidden vault within the app — it never saves to the phone’s standard gallery. If an observer is harassed and their phone is searched, the videos cannot be found or deleted by malicious actors.
Election technology can become a target for cyberattacks, political interference and attempts to discredit independent monitoring. Who will oversee Pawavox’s verification process, will its methodology be open to independent scrutiny, and how will you protect the evidence and the identities of those submitting it?
The beauty of cryptographic hashing is that it relies on decentralised mathematics, not human intermediaries. However, to ensure total transparency, Pawavox is an open-source platform. Our codebase and methodology are open to independent scrutiny by software engineers, cybersecurity experts, and civil society.
To protect against political interference and data poisoning, our system tracks the unique device IDs attached to every hash. If a coordinated cyberattack or a bad actor attempts to flood the system with malicious or false reports, we can instantly identify the anomalous device IDs and quarantine that data from the central observation pool.
Looking towards 2027, what concrete change should Nigerians expect Pawavox to deliver? Will the platform work with INEC, Yiaga Africa, other civil society organisations, election observers and newsrooms, and how will you measure whether it has improved electoral transparency and accountability?
The era of dragging unverified AI images and recycled videos into election tribunals or social media debates is over. The concrete change Nigerians should expect from Pawavox in 2027 is the delivery of absolute, mathematical truth.
Because our infrastructure is open and verifiable, we look forward to collaborating closely with Yiaga Africa, other leading civil society organisations, newsrooms, and ultimately INEC itself. We measure our success by one metric: the adoption of cryptographic evidence as the undisputed standard for transparency. When the judiciary, the media, and the public no longer have to guess if an election video is real, we will have successfully improved democratic accountability in Nigeria.
Taofeek Oyedokun is a correspondent at BusinessDay with years of experience reporting on political economy, public policy, migration, environment/climate change, and social justice. A graduate of Political Science from the University of Lagos, he has also earned multiple professional certificates in journalism and media-related training. Known for his clear, data-driven reporting, Oyedokun covers a wide range of national and international socioeconomic issues, bringing depth, balance, and public-interest focus to his work.
