The Workshop on TEI’s Election Violence Mitigation and Advocacy Tool (EVMAT) for Edo State Governorship Election commenced today 22nd July, 2024.

The DG,TEI, Dr. Sa’ad Umar Idris in his opening remarks informed participants that the workshop is geared towards equipping them with requisite set of skills to effectively engage them in the deployment of the EVMAT tool for the forthcoming Edo State Governorship Election. He reminded the participants that they have been carefully selected for the training before deployment to various local government areas of the State, in order to administer the EVMAT instrument. He drew their attention to note that successful risk mapping can only be achieved using accurate data. The Director General further admonished them to take the workshop very seriously, as the Commission is committed to conducting the Edo State Governorship election in a peaceful atmosphere, come 21st September, 2024.

The Chair BEI, Prof Abdullahi Abdu Zuru, in his opening message explained to participants that violence in elections had been a worrisome issue to INEC, indicating the genesis for the establishment the Inter-agency Consultative Committee on Election Security (ICCES) chaired by the Honourable Chairman INEC and Co-chaired by the NSA. Violence in elections has been very worrisome to INEC due to its potentials of disrupting the electoral process
as life is sacrosanct and nobody deserves to die, suffer any injuries, or loose important valuables as a result of elections.
To further strengthen its efforts at curbing election violence, the Commission through The Electoral Institute (TEI), proactively designed for deployment, the Election Violence Mitigation and Advocacy Tool (EVMAT). The is intended to track possible triggers of violence, in order to mitigate or neutralise the possibilities of occurrence of violence.

Dr Wille Eselebor, the Resource Person urged the field agents to collect the most relevant data that will help INEC in ensuring that the 2024 Edo Governorship election is the most peaceful ever. He elaborated on ethics of research, integrity of researchers, and emphasized building trust and confidence.

Participants were taken through the basic skills of practical application of the field instrument to be deployed for Data collection . The workshop ended with the question and answer session after which a thanks was given by the Director, R & D.

It may be recalled that the Commission published the final list of candidates for 2023 Kogi State Governorship Election on 9th June, 2023 in accordance with the provision of Section 32 of the Electoral Act, 2022 and the Timetable and Schedule of Activities for the Election.  please click here to download full document >> here