standards

AfroManifesto preserves political party manifestos as historical documents. The integrity of an archive depends on the discipline behind it — how documents are sourced, how they’re verified, how they’re presented, and how errors are corrected. This page explains the standards that govern that work.

We publish this methodology because an archive that won’t show its working can’t expect to be trusted.

WHAT WE COLLECT

The archive holds political party manifestos published in connection with elections held across the African continent. A manifesto, for our purposes, is any document a political party publishes to set out the policy programme it is asking voters to support during a defined electoral period. We collect: — National manifestos for presidential, legislative, and general elections — Regional and local manifestos where parties have published distinct documents — Coalition manifestos where two or more parties have published a joint platform — Re-issued and updated manifestos where parties have revised a document mid-cycle We do not collect campaign pamphlets, speech transcripts, social media content, or unofficial summaries — even when these contain policy positions. The archive’s discipline is to preserve the document the party itself chose to publish as its manifesto.

How documents enter the archive

Manifestos enter the archive through three routes. Direct submission. Political parties, party officials, or party-affiliated organisations send us documents directly. We treat these as primary sources. Where a direct submission is received, we record the date of submission and the submitting individual or office in the document’s metadata. Official sources. We retrieve documents from party websites, electoral commission filings, parliamentary records, and government archives where parties are required to lodge their manifestos as part of the candidate registration process. Recovered records. For older manifestos, particularly those that have disappeared from party websites or that pre-date widespread digital publication, we recover documents from news archives, university libraries, journalist collections, and public submissions from researchers and citizens.

Verification

Every document is checked against at least two independent sources where possible. We compare the version we hold against any other accessible copy — checking for completeness, page count, publication date, and language consistency. Where a document cannot be fully verified — for example, a manifesto recovered from a news archive that no longer exists on the party’s own platform — we publish the document with a clear note explaining what is known about its provenance, and what remains uncertain. We would rather be transparent about uncertainty than pretend it does not exist.

How documents are presented

Manifestos are preserved in their original form. We do not edit them, summarise them, paraphrase them, or translate them into other languages without making the original-language version available alongside any translation. Where a manifesto exists only in a non-Latin script or a language that limits readership, we may publish a verified translation alongside the original. Translations are clearly marked as translations, and the original document is always the authoritative version in the archive. Each manifesto is published with structured metadata: party, country, election cycle, publication date, page count, language, source of acquisition, and date of archival.

What we are not

AfroManifesto does not rank manifestos. We do not score them against each other. We do not fact-check their claims against party conduct in office. We do not endorse or recommend any party, candidate, or political position. These are important conversations. They are not our conversations. Our discipline is to preserve the record. The reader does the rest.