A pan-African coalition of civic¬ minded volunteers has built a website to help Ghanaians to easily find information concerning the voter registration process. The simple website helps citizens find their local registration centres.

The GotToVote website (www.http://ghana.gottovote.cc) explains who is eligible to register for the 2016 general elections and gives a simple overview of the voter registration process. Ghana is the fourth country to use the application, after successful use in Kenya, Malawi and Zimbabwe.

It also tells users what documentation to take with them to register, and (most importantly) helps users easily find their nearest voter registration centre.

The coalition says, “Much of this information is available elsewhere, but only as difficult ¬to¬ access PDF and MS Word or Excel documents that citizens are forced to download from a confusing variety of different ministry or other official websites”, therefore the need for a simpler platform to access all such information.

“GotToVote! Ghana takes the pain out of finding the information, by bringing it all together in one place and by presenting it in a standardised format that is easily searchable and readable,” the coalition said in a statement.

The online campaign to help people find the website uses the #GotToVote hashtag on Twitter and Facebook.

Future versions of the site will introduce SMS tools, and will help users verify their registration, find their balloting stations, and track their local election results.

According to the group, GotToVote! Ghana is not a government website. It was instead built by a grassroots Ghanaian social justice watchdog organisation, Odekro (www.odekro.org) and the continental open data and open government incubator, Code for Africa (www.codeforafrica ), in partnership with the new Code for Ghana civic hub in Accra.

“The project took just two days and $500 to execute. All the cleaned ¬up data and source materials used to power the website are available, free¬ of ¬charge, for both government and other civil society organisations to reuse on your own projects.”