PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti – Monday April 4 was a big day for Haiti, as the country announced the results of elections which had dragged on, in one form or another, for almost seven months. Popular singer and somewhat risqué icon turned politico, Michel Martelly, was declared the winner after months of campaigning fraught with voting fraud, lack of transparency and “irregularities.”
Even the opposition couldn’t argue with Mr. Martelly’s resounding 67% victory, a win which had been accurately predicted by an organization by the name of Fondation Espoir and its nationwide youth network, Jeune Ayiti. The movement had been using an SMS platform by the name of Mwen Konté (“I count”) to monitor the elections and report any foul play.
Originally established after Haiti’s devastating earthquake last year as a means to give the youth of the country a voice in the nation’s reconstruction, Mwen Konté was also designed to get them involved in building an agenda for their own future.
Fondation Espoir President and CEO Hans Tippenhauer sat down with RCR last week to talk about how he and his organization were working towards creating a participatory democracy in the country using technological tools like SMS and Google maps, while leveraging the passion of the youth.
Tippenhauer, a Haitian businessman who spent time in the US studying and working, returned to Haiti in 1992, and played an active role in the 2004 coup which toppled Jean-Bertrand Aristide. He began working for Fondation Espoir – started by his in-laws in 1995 – in 2003, with an agenda to train and foster young leaders around Haiti.
“The youth is the most vibrant part of the population and they represent a majority in Haiti,” Tippenhauer told us insisting that this was the main reason the organization had chosen to focus on using a technologically trendy platform.
“Technology is of great interest to the youth here and something we can use to achieve our purposes,” he explained, noting that the organization had been working closely with Digicel to establish the Mwen Konté platform.
Fondation Espoir started out by identifying youth organizations around the country, focusing in on the major cities like Port Au Prince, Jacmel, St Marc and Cap Haitian.
Focus groups were set up and people were asked to provide their phone number in order to become part of the network.
Jeune Ayiti also claims to have partnered with over 600 youth organizations around Haiti, and from that base, says it was able to recruits leaders and teach them to replicate the training they received inside their own associations.
The hard work seems to be paying off, too, with around 14,000 people recruited to the Mwen Konté network, 10,000 of whom are relatively active.
Leveraging its user base, the organization has been reaching out to Mwen Konté users via SMS and radio, sending out questions to answer, spurring involvement by quizzing users on their choice of election candidate, what the main voting issues were and what they felt needed to be done.
“It’s a good way to immediately test the population and find out what is happening, what the mood is,” explained Tippenhauer, who Monday was proven right when Michel Martelly – identified as a front runner even back in November – became president.
“We were one of the first organizations to identify through an SMS survey that Martelly was a popular candidate,” he said, noting that Mwen Konté’s first round survey had Martelly winning with 34% back in September.
“Most people thought we were in favour of Martelly, when in fact we were just giving the results that had come from that survey,” he maintained.
In the first round, it was Mwen Konté’s network which had been instrumental in getting the results re-examined, after revealing huge incidences of fraud. “We were able to produce 7 pages of documented frauds, reported by our people, with phones, from the voting booths,” Tippenhauer told us.
“We gave them the information and they brought together the 12 candidates to tell them they needed to fix the process. Finally they replaced the 2nd candidate (Jude Celestin)with the 3rd candidate (Mr Martelly), because they knew that there had been a lot of frauds.
Documenting fraud is no friend-making task in Haiti, however. Many have even gone as far as accusing Tippenhauer and his organization of taking money from USAID to help monitor the elections while unofficially acting as Martelly’s campaign advisor, claims Tippenhauer vehemently denies.
Mwen Konté, he asserts, was financed by the National Endowment of Democracy (NED), not USAID and the observation project for the elections was also apparently “not part of the original project and was privately financed by private members – some of them close to the Martelly campaign, but not all of them.”
Where these private members were politically linked, said Tippenhauer, was “irrelevant actually.”
“We’ve been working on our own,” he insisted, but went on to explain that since Jeune Ayiti was a large organization comprising mainly of youth, by default the majority of its members supported Mr. Martelly.
Martelly also showed himself to be much more technologically savvy than his rival during his campaign, relying heavily on robocalls, that Tippenhauer says were very well received. “It was the first time that a campaign was using such a lot of technology, and it appealed to the youth.”
It was thus inevitable, said Tippenhauer, that the organization became more involved with the Martelly campaign as time went by.
Indeed, Martelly’s camp actively used information put out by the Mwen Konté network, though Tippenhauer explained this was because it was “reliable information” rather than influenced information.
“The whole observatory network that we built was completely independent from the campaign,” he reiterated.
What about the opposition, did they index Mwen Konté’s network as Martelly supporters? “Yes, probably,” admitted Tippenhauer. Did that lead to intimidations? “Not really, but it could have happened, and it could still happen,” he warned.
Whatever the critics’ views, there’s no arguing with the numbers. When we spoke to Tippenhauer last week, he was citing election predictions of 69% for Martelly VS Manigat’s 31%. The results announced on Monday had Martelly winning at slightly over 67% to Manigat’s approximately 32%. That’s a less than 2% error rate from the Mwen Konté SMS network, compared with so called official polls used by the mainstream media over the last days and weeks – ranging from predictions of 75% to Martelly, to just below 50%, giving victory to his rival.
Tippenhauer didn’t doubt for a minute that his SMS network was accurate. “Here when people vote, they talk to one another, so most people know who the other voted for. Our data shows that he has won in 115 different communes, while Manigat would have won only in 25 communes.” This too has proved to be spot on.
Not that the second round was without its “irregularities” either. For instance, “when you go to vote and there is no ink to put on your finger after, or there is no marker, or you get there and there is no ballot for the president but there is a ballot for the senator or the deputy,” Tippenhauer explained.
He also suggested it was “weird” that the UN’s MUNISTAH had maintained the country was completely ready for the second round of elections but then failed to complete all the necessary preparations, meaning some polling stations opened only at 11am on election day, instead of 6am, like they were supposed to. “That’s an irregularity,” he stated.
While documenting irregularities on easily accessible Google Maps and documents was a priority for Fondation Espoir/Jeune Ayiti, anger over the lack of electoral transparency and concern over getting accurate results prompted some to call for more militant action.
“We received a lot of calls from organizations wanting to set up riots and protests,” Tippenhauer told us, maintaining he had told them to remain calm and “very quiet.”
“The organizations we’re in touch with are not very happy, but we don’t control them, and we don’t know who could light the first match or what would happen after,” he explained. “But it is not the role of this organization [to cause trouble]” he added.
Instead, Fondation Espoir/Jeune Ayiti is attempting to strengthen civil society and to encourage youth to have their say peacefully on sites like Twitter and Facebook. “I’m a member of the world movement for democracy. It’s something that interests me highly,” said Tippenhauer in relation to his observations of the recent Middle East social network fuelled uprisings. “We believe there are already 100k Haitians using Facebook,” he added.
“It’s been a very long campaign for us. We’ve been doing pre election questions since August, so it’s almost 7 months now. The people are tired, definitely, and they’re really not very happy about the way the elections were handled,” he continued, saying he believed more access to the Internet and systems like the Mwen Konté network would continue to alleviate the process.
Perhaps it’s for this very reason that the organization is also actively setting up WiFi hotspots in secondary schools, hoping to increase access to the internet and information for the younger generation.
“Not just to express themselves but also hopefully to create enterprises or find ways to really participate in the development of their country,” concluded Tippenhauer. It certainly sounds like a good start.
