Zuela - A New Political Network Mobile App 

On Friday, February 24, 2017, Friends of Angola, an NGO founded by MS alumnus Florindo Chivucute, held a presentation at S-CAR to present on their newest project - a  mobile application with the aim of promoting political engagement and good governance between civil society, especially the youth, and their respective governments. 

According to Chivucute, the inspiration for this mobile application came about after he came across an article published by the Huffington Post, in which  researchers found out that only 26 percent of eligible young voters turned out to vote during the 2014 midterm elections in the United States. These statistics were quite worrying for Florindo and after conducting some more research, reliased that there was a similar trend in other countries. "I was appalled to learn that in 2014 in South Africa only about 8.4 percent of eligible voters between the ages of 18-19 and less than 50 percent between 20-29 had registered to vote," Chivucute said. 

Chivucute also cited a 2014 BBC research, which found that in the United Kingdom the younger generation electorate were becoming increasingly disengaged with the democratic system, but they were still very passionate about political issues that would affect them such as poverty, unemployment, and lower levels of wealth and personal income, race debates, and human rights issues among others. According to Hanna Yamir, an S-CAR alumna and staff member of Friends of Angola, "The real issue here is that individuals, especially the youth seem to have lost their confidence in their elected officials to bring about the change that they wanted and as such had stopped interacting with their respective political systems as they should."

Zuela, the name for this mobile application which translates as Speak Up, was thus designed to enable users engage with issues that they are passionate about and then interact with the relevant government agencies, NGO’s, civil society groups, and business organizations. 

Rather than being another opinion based application, Chivucute mentioned that Zuela is mainly evidence focused. "For example, if I find myself in a country that is just about to hold elections and I come across a group of individiuals who appear to be tampering with ballot boxes, I can record or take a picture, write a comment and post it to the central zuela server which will be seen by everyone. The electoral agency of that country will have the ability to comment on the image or video," Florindo explained. Yamir, also mentioned that the interaction was not limited to only govenrment agencies but also business, NGOs, and civil society groups who may have the resources to help address some of these issues.  

Currently, the application has five main topics that the user can choose from. These are elections, politics, corruption, violence, and human rights, and these are designed to provide guidance for the user in terms of the kinds of issues they can post about. These categories also make it easier for governments, civil society groups, business organizations to respond to posts. As Chivucute said, "This app is meant to help individuals bridge the gap between governance and citizen participation – a first step in any good governance process." 

Chivucute also mentioned that the first phase of the mobile application development was made possible by the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), inputs from staff at Amensty International as well as some members of the S-CAR community. "We also just finalized talks with Microsoft on using their platform Azure, to make our application reach more people and regions," Chivucute said. The next phase for Zuela, Yamir mentioned, was to work on getting funding to enable this project to grow and make it accessible to places where there is limited access. 

At the end of the presentation, Chivucute mentioned that the app was available for free for both Android and iOS.