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Elections have shown serious weaknesses in holding power to account and in enabling societies to identify leaders who are well-qualified to address crucial issues and problems affecting the people. Yet, elections continue to be a necessary democratic exercise due to the lack of a viable alternative in collectively deciding on who will rule.
Mobilizing citizens who will undertake collective conscientization, analysis, and agenda-setting would be crucial to prevent the elections from being further captured by money and dynastic politics. With social media being prone to disinformation, citizen-led information-sharing and fact-checking to inform collective analysis and choices would be crucial. Civil society needs to offer an alternative to the traditional and patronage-based engagement of politicians with citizens, to somehow offer hope for reforms in elections.
This year, Government Watch (G-Watch) relaunched Making Elections an Accountability Platform (MEAP), its citizenship education initiative for national and local elections.
MEAP serves as a platform for citizens to collectively discuss the national situation and come up with a crucial campaign agenda to be used in engaging and/ or gauging candidates and parties. MEAP forms part of G-Watch’s integrated citizen action that connects engagement in governance with electoral outcomes as key interconnected components of an accountability ecosystem. The 2025 MEAP is a re-run of MEAPs in previous years that facilitated citizen engagement in elections to advance public accountability.
MEAP 2025, in particular, aimed to turn the 2025 elections as a platform to advance G-Watch’s reform agenda on health, education, social protection and transparency-participation-accountability (TPA).
This report presents the highlights of MEAP 2025: its reach, the key inputs, the issues identified and ways forward.