How to Appoint a Ward Coordinator, and What to Agree First

A ward coordinator is the only person in your campaign who can tell you what is true in a ward. Get the appointment wrong and you will spend a year being told what somebody thinks you want to hear.

The usual appointment goes like this. A respected person in the ward is offered the title in a conversation, added to a group chat, thanked warmly, and then contacted only when a rally needs filling. Nothing was agreed. Nothing can therefore be expected.

What the role is actually for

Three things, and they are all operational.

Recruiting and holding a team of volunteers in that ward. Producing a weekly account of what was done. Knowing every polling stream in the ward and who will sit in each one on 10 August 2027.

That is it. A ward coordinator is not a spokesman, not an adviser on strategy, and not a person whose function is to be seen next to the candidate. Campaigns that appoint on prestige get prestige. The archive sets out the measurement side of the job in detail: what a ward coordinator should be measured on.

The four checks before you appoint anybody

Do they live in the ward, now? Not from the ward. In it. Somebody who moved to town and returns at Christmas cannot run a ward, however well known the family name is.

Have they organised anything before? A sacco, a chama, a burial committee, a school board, a church group, a boda stage. Somebody who has already made ten other people turn up on a Saturday has proved the only skill the job needs.

Who do they bring, and who do they close off? Every appointment in a Kenyan ward carries a reading. Ask honestly which households will now be easier to reach and which will now assume the campaign is not for them. Sometimes the answer is fine. Sometimes it costs you half the ward and nobody warned you.

Are they free? A person with a full-time job in another town, three committees and a business cannot do this, and will not say so, because declining feels like a rejection of the candidate. You have to ask the question in a way that makes no an acceptable answer.

The five things to agree at the start

Say all five out loud at the appointment, and write them down afterwards.

1. What they report, and when. A short weekly account with actual numbers. Households visited, volunteers who completed a task, streams still without an agent. If nothing is due, nothing gets done.

2. Who they report to. One person, by name. Not the candidate, not four people, not the group chat.

3. What they can decide alone. Which streets to visit this week, who joins their volunteer team, how to run their own meetings. A coordinator who has to ask permission for everything will do nothing.

4. What they may never decide alone. Anything involving money, anything said publicly on behalf of the campaign, and any promise to a voter about a job or a payment. Bribery is a criminal offence under the Election Offences Act 2016, and a campaign is judged by what its people do in its name.

5. How money moves. How costs are claimed, what evidence is required, who approves, and how long payment takes. Every campaign quarrel about money starts with this conversation not having happened.

The ones who keep getting appointed and should not be

The person who asked for the job first is not automatically the right person, and in a ward with a live contest for a nomination, an early volunteer for the coordinator title is sometimes positioning for something else.

The former MCA who lost is a difficult case. They know the ward, and they carry the last election with them. Ask whether the households that voted against them are households you need.

The candidate's relative is the hardest case, because the appointment is usually made for reasons nobody in the room will say out loud, and because that person cannot be replaced later without a family quarrel. If you appoint one, agree the measures in writing on the same day as everybody else, and apply them.

What to do in a ward where nobody suitable will take it

This will happen in at least one ward, usually a hostile one or a remote one.

Do not appoint a warm body to fill the box on the org chart. An unfilled ward you can see is a problem you can work on. A ward with a name against it and no activity is a problem hidden from you for six months.

Instead, cover it directly from the campaign for now, put one of your four central role-holders personally on it, and keep looking. Related: the four roles.

Then write the five agreements on a single page this week and take it to the coordinators you have already appointed. Most of them were never told what the job was, and several will be relieved to hear it.