In many countries, elections tend to be well produced, extensively covered media events, with audiences tuning in for real-time updates and sophisticated visualisations that show the latest results and estimates.

“In Nigeria, this is not the case,” says Yvette Dimiri, Head of Subscriptions Growth at Stears Business.

“When it’s election night in Nigeria, you’re typically gathered around the screen, watching election officials enter data into an Excel sheet. It’s a very painful event.”

As a new publisher, Stears wanted to seize this opportunity to create a more innovative approach. But it also knew that many older media organisations invest a lot of resources in their election coverage in terms of boots on the ground and experienced political analysts. “We couldn’t really compete with that, so we had to get a bit creative,” she said, during WAN-IFRA’s Digital Media Africa 2022 conference.

Stears is a Nigerian company with a mission is “to become the world’s most trusted source of African data, insight and data collection tools for businesses, financial and policy professionals.” It first started publishing in 2017 with a small network of people, and as the 2019 general elections approached in Nigeria, they set out to use their data expertise to stand out from the other players in the space.

The result was the Stears Election Centre. “The goal there was to allow anyone in the world to easily access quantitative results and data about Nigeria’s elections,“ both for…