International Consultant – Design & Development of a Gender Election Watch Africa (GEWA), a Pan-African Feminist Digital Electoral Platform

Background: UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security. Placing women's rights at the centre of all its efforts, UN Women leads and coordinates United Nations system efforts to ensure that commitments on gender equality and gender mainstreaming translate into action throughout the world. The Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office (ESARO) coordinates and provides oversight to UN Women’s work in 13 countries across the region. The Office also plays a key role in ensuring the coordination mandate of UN Women as well as supports country offices' resource mobilization efforts. ESARO serves as the hub of technical assistance, policy guidance and oversight, as well as thought leadership on gender equality and women’s empowerment issues in the region. UN Women’s Leadership and Decision-Making (LDM) portfolio is a central area of work under the UN Women Strategic Plan 2026–2029 and the ESARO Strategic Note 2026–2029. In the East and Southern Africa region, it focuses on strengthening accountability for gender equality commitments by working with civil society, regional and national institutions, UN entities, Member States, electoral bodies, political parties, parliaments, and women’s movements. The LDM portfolio seeks to advance gender parity, inclusive electoral and political reforms, shared accountability benchmarks, peer learning, and regional problem-solving to advance women’s leadership and decision-making. In Africa, women remain underrepresented as voters, candidates, election administrators and political leaders. While legal reforms and gender quotas have advanced in several countries, systemic barriers persist: electoral violence targeting women, discriminatory party nomination processes, unequal media coverage, cyber harassment, and limited access to campaign financing. These gaps are compounded by fragmented data. Information on women’s political participation is often scattered across reports, not updated in real time and rarely disaggregated by disability, age, or geography. Critically, there is currently no Pan-African feminist digital platform that provides gendered electoral information timeously. Existing initiatives either focus on single countries, publish post-election analysis months later, or lack a feminist lens that centers the experiences of women political leaders and marginalized groups. Equally urgent, there is no continental platform that systematically profiles female candidates during an election cycle and rallies others to provide sister-to-sister solidarity. Women candidates often campaign in isolation, facing attacks without visible networks of support. This absence of real-time visibility and collective backing reinforces impunity for violence and erodes women’s political ambition. These twin gaps leave aspiring women leaders, women leaders, journalists, policymakers, election observers and donors without timely, actionable data or solidarity infrastructure to respond to violations, track trends, or amplify women’s political agency during the most critical moments of democratic processes. Without accessible, comparative and verified data and without a mechanism to mobilize feminist solidarity as campaigns unfold, women’s rights organizations struggle to hold institutions accountable and to design evidence-based interventions when they matter most. In that regard UN Women seeks to support a regional organization to develop a Gender Election Watch Africa (GEWA) responds to this urgent dual gap as a continental digital platform dedicated to making every African election visible through a gender lens while it happens and to making every woman candidate visible, protected and backed by a pan-African sisterhood. UN Women Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Office (ESARO), in line with its mandate on promoting women’s leadership and decision-making (LDM) and commitments under SDG 5.5 and Beijing+30, together with its partners WALPE Africa and FEMNET who are the custodians of the Pan African All Female election Observation Mission (PAFOM) seeks to engage a consultant to develop the Gender Election Watch Africa (GEWA) as a digital platform dedicated to making every African election visible through a gender lens. GEWA must be designed as a secure, accessible and user-centered platform. Its development should be guided by feminist data principles, informed consent, data protection, digital safety, accessibility, safeguarding and a do-no-harm approach. The platform should not only make gendered electoral information visible, but also ensure that electoral stakeholders are not exposed to additional risk through the collection, publication or use of sensitive information. Description of Responsibilities /Scope of Work: The consultant will report to the UN Women Regional Policy Specialist and work closely with the designated partner institutions to co-create GEWA through a participatory and capacity-strengthening process. The consultant will be responsible for the following tasks: Design and develop the GEWA platform prototype: Develop a secure, accessible and user-centred digital platform prototype that demonstrates the core functionality of GEWA as a Pan-African feminist electoral information platform; Build core platform modules: Create, at minimum, interactive country dashboards, candidate profile pages, an election calendar, a gender alert tracker on violence against women in politics, thematic analysis hubs, and a searchable legal and policy database; Humanise and contextualise electoral data: Ensure candidate profile pages include relevant manifestos, testimonies and personal leadership stories, subject to informed consent and safeguarding protocols, to make the data meaningful and accessible to users; Develop a user-friendly content management system: Design a content management backend that enables trained UN Women and partner staff to update dashboards, candidate profiles, alerts, briefs and other platform content without continuous developer support; Strengthen partner capacity and platform sustainability: Provide technical leadership, mentoring and advisory support to equip the partner institution to manage platform administration, content management, data governance, safeguarding protocols and future platform expansion. The GEWA platform should meet the following minimum technical requirements: Mobile-responsive, accessible and user-friendly design; Public-facing website with interactive country dashboards; Backend content management functionality for trained administrators; Search and filter functions by country, election type, gender-disaggregated indicators, age, disability, region and election cycle; Data visualization tools, including charts, maps, trend lines and scorecards; Candidate profile module with safeguards for informed consent and protection of personal information; Election calendar with upcoming elections, relevant reforms and quota provisions; Role-based administrator access and basic security controls; Basic analytics to track platform usage; Compatibility with major browsers and mobile devices; Handover documentation and administrator/user guides. Target users: GEWA is designed to serve and equip a broad ecosystem of democratic actors: Feminist movements and other CSOs seeking data and solidarity infrastructure during elections; Electoral management bodies (EMBs) requiring gender-disaggregated data to meet legal mandates and improve electoral integrity; Political parties aiming to strengthen women’s political representation, meet quota obligations, and develop gender-responsive manifestos; Election observation missions-domestic, regional and international needing real-time gender analysis and VAWP alert