Summary
The Kenya Human Rights Commission (KHRC) a non-profit organization whose core mandate is to promote and protect human rights and foster an accountable democratic culture where every person can live with dignity and freedom.

In 2022, Kenya was headed for its general election in the month of August. KHRC reached out to Globetrack to aid in monitoring all the events around the preparation and processes leading to the general elections. The monitoring was both in traditional and digital platforms.

Objective/Brief
Part of KHRC’s role in every electioneering period to ensure all actors or stakeholders involved in the electoral cycle (prior to, during, and after) adhere to human rights principles and standards set out in Kenya’s constitution. Our aim was to collect media data concerning human rights violation or any atrocities committed during this period. Goals included:

• Any form of violence reported
• Political parties nominations or party primaries
• Any form of discrimination either on basis of ethnicity or gender
• Elections’ regulator preparedness
• Electoral civic education
• Issuance of national identity cards
• Freedom of media

Globetrack, a crucial partner to KHRC was able to compile data from various media sources, package it to a relatable and understandable format for KHRC to consume and issue weekly status reports on the processes during the electioneering period.

Our main focus on data was from reliable and mainstream sources because, during elections, numerous sources of unverified information, some of which could be manipulated to escalate propaganda from different political parties involved in the general elections is common. This was critical because evidence was required for any action that KHRC was to take against perpetrators of human rights.

Strategy
Having clearly put down the objectives for this campaign, we embarked on a suitable approach on how to best achieve and collect the data. Monitoring was done prior to, during and after elections. The form of monitoring took into account the use of traditional and social media sources.

Globetrack also included additional channels into the monitoring systems to expound and cater for key regions that KHRC had highlighted to be hot spots for elections having observed in the previous general elections.

Furthermore, we included both qualitative and quantitative analysis on the editorial content, to give more insights and deduced more meaningful information from it. Together with KHRC, we came to an agreement on three major categories of mentions collected which included;
a)Gross mentions- these are stories reported on extreme violations of human rights committed in disturbing manner such as shooting, strangulation or those that affected a large magnitude of people.
b)Systemic or pattern mentions – These involved atrocities repeatedly reported in a specific location and region and committed in more or less similar methods.
c)Frequency of the mentions- These involved the number of times a single story was reported in the media.

The analysis was done on a basis of daily, weekly, monthly and ad hoc occasions when it needed prompt action.

Execution/Implementation
Traditional Media:
Using our house monitoring system our team embarked on tracking and thoroughly reviewing coverage from the most reliable and widely read publications and programs, encompassing daily newspapers, weekly magazines, online news sources as well as reputable and verifiable radio and television broadcasts. This comprehensive assessment involved searching every page of print publications, analysing complete broadcast news, interviews and programs along with examining the entirety of each trusted online news site’s, so as to identify how many of these mentions were on electoral malpractices themes which included violence, discrimination, misuse of public funds or attack on journalists during the campaigns period, covered by these sources on a daily basis.

Social Media:
Using our social media tracking tool, we employed a two-tier approach to monitoring this.

First, we tracked single keywords, combination of words and phrases or hashtags for instance elections, #kenyadecides, 2022 polls, party nominations, August general elections just to mention a few of them.

Secondly, we tracked specific sources i.e. websites, pages and profiles in order to get the frequency and the conversations round the 2022 general elections.

With both teams in place, we structured a cyclic alert system to enable us notify the client on gross violations which needed prompt response and action. This was done through already existing alerts in the social monitoring tool in addition to our team sharing mentions from the traditional media via WhatsApp, email and holding virtual training sessions just to ensure the data was near real-time to re- align in cases where there are emerging and new updates on how to handle reports.

After all the data was collected, the analysts consolidated mentions from both sources and prepared a comprehensive report on the various thematic areas i.e. giving insights on the happenings reported.

Effectiveness of Assignment
Findings:
From this assignment, it was evident that during such events as elections many other issues come to surface such as judicial independence, state of education, excess and security concerns among others. In the “prior to” electioneering period, most cases reported were on misuse of public fund by most political leaders to carry out their campaigns and manifestos, as well as the muddled party primaries.

In the “during” period, is where everything manifested and seemed like the hot cake of the electioneering period. The violence and chaos cases increased significantly where police brutality, sexual based gender violence, journalist harassment as wells as short comings and failures of the electoral body.

In the “after” period, it was majorly characterised by controversies. Right from the elections results announcements to what preceded after the president and the winning party took office.

Actions taken:
With qualitative and quantitative analysis, KHRC was able to take action on some of the cases categorised as gross and systemic and escalate them to the relevant state, non-state actors and other stakeholders directly involved.

From the submitted reports KHRC was also able to identify journalists who reported most of the human rights stories during this period and awarded them as human rights journalist champions. Also, the client was able to get in-depth information of what was reported during the electioneering period.

For cases reported on lack of issuance of national Identity cards, KHRC was able to put in check the mandate of the government as it is the sole actor responsible for upholding such constitutional rights and protecting them.

The real-time data received saw KHRC respond to human rights violations from various parts of the country. The reports further enabled KHRC to take both legal and non-legal actions against both state and non-state actors for human rights violations committed.

Globetrack Supporting Document