Version 1.0 · Effective 10 September 2026 · Last reviewed 10 September 2026 · Next review 10 December 2026
Operated by FIREBIRD COMPUTING LTD. barazacivic@gmail.com
1. What Baraza is, and is not
Baraza is a civic platform for Kenya’s 2027 general election. It publishes who is contesting every seat, where people vote, how many voters are registered in each place, and what candidates say for themselves. It lets voters follow, question and challenge them.
Baraza does not tell anyone how to vote. We do not endorse candidates or parties, we do not rank them by merit, and we do not publish an opinion about who should win. Where we describe a candidate, we are reporting what the record says or what they told us, and we label which is which.
2. The commercial wall
We sell to campaigns. Pretending otherwise would be the fastest way to lose the trust this platform runs on, so here is the whole list, in both directions.
Money can buy:
- verification processing — the work of checking by hand who a candidate is;
- campaign tooling — analytics, team accounts, event and volunteer forms, the API;
- advertising and boosted distribution — a post promoted in the feed, always carrying a Boosted label;
- digital billboards — a paid slot in the feed, always carrying a Sponsored label;
- SMS infrastructure — the ability to message people who opted in to hear from you.
Money cannot buy:
- favourable editorial treatment of any kind;
- ranking or placement in organic results — candidate directories, place pages, party rosters and search are ordered alphabetically, and nothing purchasable changes that order;
- inclusion in, or removal from, the candidate or aspirant directory;
- suppression of a citizen issue, a question or a critical reply;
- a more favourable comparison against another candidate;
- alteration of a factual record, including a promise, a source or a past statement.
There is no price for any item in the second list. There is no negotiation, no relationship, and no volume of spending that changes it. If someone tells you otherwise, they are not speaking for Baraza and we want to hear about it.
3. What changed on 10 September 2026
We are stating this plainly rather than quietly fixing it. Until this policy took effect, two paid plans advertised “priority placement in search” and “featured national placement”, and the candidate directory really did sort paying campaigns above everyone else — without a label saying so. Separately, verified candidates were listed above unverified ones, and verification is paid for.
Both are gone. Those listings are now alphabetical, the two plans no longer offer or charge for placement, and paid visibility survives only in the labelled forms named above. We thought it better to publish the correction than to publish a policy that quietly described a system we had just changed.
4. Verification is a fact, not an endorsement
The gold badge means one specific thing: a person at Baraza has looked at that candidate’s IEBC nomination paperwork and satisfied themselves that the person is who they claim to be and is contesting the seat they claim. That is all it means.
- It is not a judgement about their character, competence or fitness for office.
- It is not a recommendation, and it does not imply Baraza prefers them.
- It does not make their claims true; a verified candidate can still be wrong.
- It does not move them up any list. An unverified candidate appears in exactly the same places, in the same order, as a verified one.
We charge for the checking work, not for the outcome. Paying does not guarantee the badge: if the paperwork does not support the claim, the badge is refused and the fee for the checking is not a reason to grant it.
5. How candidates and aspirants get listed
Most people on Baraza never asked to be here, and did not pay to be. There are three routes, and each is labelled on the page:
- Community nomination — someone told us this person is contesting. Shown as an aspirant, marked unverified, with the source recorded.
- Research import — taken from a public source such as a party list or a published record. The source, its URL and the date it was checked are stored with the record and shown on the page.
- Claimed profile — the person signed up and now speaks for themselves.
Being listed is not a favour and cannot be bought. Equally, it cannot be bought off: a candidate cannot pay to have a rival removed, or to have their own entry deleted because they dislike what the public record says. See section 7 for what they can do instead.
6. Sourcing and accuracy
- Every imported record carries where it came from, and when we last checked it. Pages show how stale that is rather than hiding it.
- Where a source cannot be traced, the record is held back rather than published on a guess.
- Where we are unsure of a detail — a party label, a ward — we leave it blank instead of filling it in plausibly.
- Statistics come from the publishing body and are attributed to it. Registered-voter counts are the IEBC’s own figures and are labelled with the register year.
- We do not invent numbers. Baraza does not publish inflated user counts, fabricated engagement or made-up survey results, on this site or in its marketing.
7. Corrections and complaints
If something about you here is wrong, we want to fix it, and you do not need an account or a lawyer to ask.
- Use the Report incorrect information link on any aspirant page, or email barazacivic@gmail.com.
- We aim to respond within five working days.
- A factual error is corrected on the record itself. We do not silently rewrite history where the correction is significant — the page notes that it was corrected.
- A correction request is free, and is handled the same way whether or not you have ever paid us anything.
- Disagreeing with a published fact is not the same as that fact being wrong. Where we are satisfied the record is accurate, we will say so and explain why, and you are entitled to publish your own response on your profile.
8. Conflicts of interest
- Nobody who works on Baraza may hold office in, or be employed by, a political party or campaign while making editorial or verification decisions about it.
- Where a member of staff has a personal connection to a candidate, they do not handle that candidate’s verification, moderation or corrections.
- Baraza does not accept payment, gifts or hospitality from a campaign outside the published prices on our pricing page.
9. Moderation
We remove content that breaks the Terms of Service — hate speech, ethnic incitement, harassment, impersonation, and deliberate misinformation about the electoral process. We do not remove content because it is critical of a candidate, including one who pays us. Moderation decisions are made against the published rules, not against the account’s spending.
10. Independence and funding
Baraza is self-funded and commercially operated by FIREBIRD COMPUTING LTD. It is not owned by, funded by or affiliated with any political party, campaign, candidate or government body, in Kenya or elsewhere. If that ever changes — through investment, grant or partnership — we will disclose it here before it takes effect, not afterwards.
11. Changes to this policy
This document is versioned and dated. Substantive changes raise the version number and are summarised here rather than made silently. It is reviewed at least quarterly; the next scheduled review is 10 December 2026.
Read alongside the Privacy Policy and the Terms of Service.