While the use of Twitter has become increasingly familiar in North America, Europe and many parts of Asia, it is still a very new and relatively unknown tool in other regions of the world such as Sub-Saharan Africa. However, it has proven to be an efficient way to quickly share information in times of political changes such as yesterday’s Presidential and Parliamentary elections in Ghana.

The Mobile Active blog commented on the importance of sms for election monitoring, especially after the instances of fraud of violence experienced in the last months in Kenya, Zimbabwe and Nigeria:

Each of the 4,000 trained observers-mostly members of the 34-organization strong CODEO coalition–are deployed all over Ghana are using their phones to report on incidences at the polls and how well the polls are conducted, using a coded checklist. As we have reported before, systematic SMS reporting by trained local citizen observers about how well an election is conducted can prevent rumors, and is an independent and reliable indicator about the quality of the election process.

One of the Twitter users that twittered the vote and the subsequent results almost minute by minute was Ghanaelections, a Twitter account set up by the African Elections project, aimed at developing the capacity of the media in ICTs in order for them to use it as a tool for election coverage in Ghana, Cote d’lvoire and Guinea from 2008 to 2009.

A few hours later, the first provisional results were also posted on Twitter as they were being announced. For example, chrisdof announced that the winning of a seat in Parliament by the daughter of Kwame Nkrumah who led Ghana to independence in 1957.