CIVIC_Voice

What Inspired Us

We are UR-CST students who witness a daily problem in Kigali citizens have no easy official way to report broken roads, water shortages, or electricity failures, and other challenges. Authorities only discover problems when they become serious. We built Civic Voice because we believe every Rwandan deserves a direct channel to their government.

What We Built

We built Civic Voice APP, a two-sided civic engagement web platform. Citizens open the app, describe a local problem or share an opinion on a government decision, attach a photo, use voice input, and submit in under 2 minutes. They receive a tracking ID and can follow their submission status live. On the admin side, government officials log into a secure dashboard, see all submissions on an interactive Kigali map, respond to citizens, and mark issues as Reviewed or Actioned.

Role of Claude AI in Our App

Claude AI is the intelligence engine inside Civic Voice. When a citizen submits feedback, our app sends the text to Claude AI, which analyzes it and returns the community sentiment: Support, Neutral, or Oppose, a 2-sentence summary of the issue, and the specific Kigali authority that should handle it, such as WASAC for water, REG for electricity, RURA for telecoms, or City of Kigali for roads. Claude AI also powers the built-in chatbot that helps citizens express their opinions, and generates trend analysis reports for administrators showing patterns across all submissions. Without Claude AI, our app is just a form. With Claude AI, it becomes a governance intelligence tool.

How We Built It

We designed and developed the entire application during the official build period. We used React and TypeScript for the frontend, Chakra UI for the interface components, Firebase Firestore for real-time database, Firebase Authentication for secure admin login, Leaflet.js with OpenStreetMap for the interactive Kigali map, and Recharts for analytics charts. We deployed the live application on Vercel. We also built full Kinyarwanda language support so all Rwandan citizens can use the app regardless of English proficiency.

Challenges We Faced

The hardest challenge was designing prompts that make Claude AI return consistent, structured JSON responses every time not just sometimes. We solved this by specifying the exact output format in our prompts and handling edge cases in our parsing logic. Another challenge was building the Kigali map without official geodata. We also had to carefully design a privacy system that collects citizen contact information for follow-up while keeping it completely hidden from the public and only visible to authenticated administrators.