Nigeria’s civil society landscape is filled with well-intentioned initiatives. From campaigns that generate headlines but change no laws, voter education drives that inform but don’t mobilize to groups that protest but lack the organizational muscle to sustain pressure, the pattern is clear.
Despite decades of democratic governance and a vibrant civil society sector, the actual practice of democracy is weak.
The problem isn’t lack of passion or good intentions. The problem is structure or more precisely, the lack of it. This siloed approach creates three fatal weaknesses:
First, the sector suffers from resource fragmentation, where multiple organizations compete for identical donor funds to address the same issues from scattered points.
This dilutes impact, duplicates efforts, and deepens an unsustainable dependency on external funding.
Consequently, this competitive environment breeds knowledge isolation; hard-won lessons, contacts, and operational experience remain trapped within individual organizations rather than evolving into collective wisdom that elevates the entire sector and finally, power diffusion.
Without coordinated action, civil society’s voice reduces to a cacophony of competing interests that politicians can easily ignore or manipulate..
The result? Decades of activism that generate heat but little light.
Silos in Civic-Tech
An obvious gap and where this piece will focus intently, is how we have built or are building civic-tech tools. From civic education platforms to transparency and accountability trackers and election mobilization apps and, more recently, a plethora of AI tools, the innovation pipeline has never been short of ideas.
However, despite this abundance, the civic tech ecosystem has largely grown horizontally rather than vertically, with each organisation building in isolation and creating overlapping tools with limited interoperability.
This siloed approach contrasts sharply with the very spirit of open government that civil society advocates. More importantly, because civic tech is largely driven by civil society organisations, this fragmentation is diluting civil society’s collective voice.
Integration as Strategy
But what if we approached civic technology differently? What if, instead of building in isolation, organizations deliberately designed their tools to connect and amplify each other?
A connected civic tech ecosystem signals an integrated civil society, one that can mobilise citizens at scale, coordinate advocacy efforts, and sustain pressure on government using shared data, technology, and resources.
There are four interconnected layers of civic infrastructure that amplify each other’s effectiveness.
Foundation Pillar: Civic education infrastructure to build critical thinking skills, interest, and systemic understanding of how our governance works (or should work).
Engagement Pillar: Channels that transform education into sustained action , not just voting, but year-round citizen engagement with representatives and institutions.
Organization Pillar: Political structure that transforms individual citizens into collective power through disciplined, accountable political organizations with a clear theory of change.
Accountability Pillar: Governance oversight mechanisms that ensure transparency, create consequences for behaviour, and reward responsive leadership.
When these layers work together in series, they create exponential rather than additive impact. Educated citizens participate more effectively.
Organised participation creates political pressure. Political pressure enables accountability. Accountability creates space for better governance, which supports more civic education and participation. The flywheel keeps turning.
This is the unlock that we must intentionally build for as an ecosystem. Organisations combining efforts to build interoperable initiatives, interventions, and technology within each pillar as a stack, and each pillar directly feeding each other.
What can this look like?
An integrated civic tech stack envisions a framework where tools are built to complement rather than compete. For instance, a stack could link:
- Citizens engagement platforms that educate voters on candidates
- Promise tracking systems that monitor campaign commitments
- Citizen feedback mechanisms that report implementation status
- Budget dashboards that show fiscal allocations against promises
- Accountability scorecards that rate official performance
Imagine if verified campaign promises automatically integrated into a public policy tracker, which in turn updated from open-budget dashboards that monitor fiscal allocations.
This unified dataset could feed into community feedback forms where citizens report whether promised projects were delivered. The result would be citizens, journalists, and policymakers working with a unified source of civic truth.
Nigeria’s civic ecosystem could start with a civic Data Layer, a shared repository of open, standardised datasets on governance, budgets, and policies.
Above that could sit an Engagement Layer, where citizens interact with these datasets through apps, chatbots, or SMS. Finally, an Innovation Layer could allow new civic startups to plug in using shared APIs,authentication tools, and analytics systems.
This principle of stacked infrastructure is not new. The fintech ecosystem in Nigeria offers a living model. Before the era of integrated payment systems, mobile banking was impossible. Today, thanks to the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) and open banking frameworks, users can transfer across banks and fintech apps almost seamlessly.
Civic tech can borrow from this model by creating Civic Interoperability Protocols, standard APIs and data frameworks that enable different platforms to communicate securely.
Globally, India’s Digital Public Infrastructure, notably the India Stack, offers a masterclass in how layered systems can transform public service.
Built around digital identity (Aadhaar), payments (UPI), and data consent layers, India Stack enables private and civic innovators to plug into a national framework, producing exponential outcomes.
Similarly, in Estonia, civic engagement and governance platforms are interconnected through the X-Road, a backbone that links government databases, NGOs, and even businesses under secure, interoperable standards.
How the ecosystem benefits
This structure delivers multiple benefits simultaneously:
For Civil Society: Organizations share verified insights, coordinate campaigns, and can present a united front in demanding transparency, accountability, and reform. Collaboration attracts funders who increasingly prefer systemic investments over one-off projects.
By pooling data and infrastructure, civic tech organisations reduce redundancy, enhance collaboration, and deepen democratic impact.
For Citizens: The same platforms can serve multiple functions. A voter who learns about candidates through the education layer can track their promises through the engagement layer and later report results through the accountability layer, all within a connected ecosystem where information builds progressively. This creates both convenience and depth..
For Democracy: Sustained, organized pressure on government becomes possible. Individual organizations making individual demands are easy to ignore.
A unified civil society armed with shared data, coordinated messaging, and demonstrated citizen support is far more difficult to dismiss.
For Funders: Rather than funding dozens of parallel initiatives addressing the same problem, donors can invest in shared infrastructure that multiplies the impact of each individual organization. This reduces overhead, improves sustainability, and creates a path to measurable systemic change
Blueprint for the New Generation
Building these stacks requires a fundamental shift in how Nigeria’s emerging civic leaders approach the work. Here’s how we must begin:
- Impact over Idea: We must be humble enough to accept that individual ideas are always less important than collective impact.
- Ruthless prioritization: Our work must focus ruthlessly and collectively consolidate on the highest-leverage interventions rather than trying to solve everything at once.
- Embrace political realism: Civil society cannot remain “above politics” while expecting political outcomes. The new generation must understand that civic education without political organization is an academic exercise, and political organization without accountability mechanisms will become corrupt.
- Build for local & community ownership: This means developing solutions with the community to enable ownership, this allows inputs such as membership contributions and community investment that ensure improved participation & longer sustainability of interventions.
- Measure what matters: Move beyond counting workshops held or people reached to tracking concrete policy wins, electoral accountability, and institutional changes.
The path forward requires less ego and more strategy, less noise and more organized power. Philanthropic funders, local incubators, and civil society leaders must invest in shared infrastructure projects such as civic APIs, open data repositories, and joint capacity-building programs.
Just as technology stacks revolutionized finance, civic stacks can revolutionize democratic participation.
Like anything there will be issues to grapple with. Which is why the most critical stack we need to build first is not of technology, but of trust and shared strategy among diverse actors.
Let this be the start of that conversation: How do we govern a shared civic infrastructure? What is the sustainable economic model? How do we design for the rural and city demographics simultaneously?
The future of our democracy depends not on a single perfect solution, but on our collective willingness to engage with these hard questions and build. Iteratively and inclusively, from the ground up.
