Idayat Hassan is director of the Centre for Democracy and Development (CDD), an Abuja-based policy advocacy and research organisation focusing on deepening democracy and development in West Africa. Idayat is a lawyer and has held fellowships in universities across Europe and the United States. Her interests span democracy, peace and security, transitional justice, and information and communications technology for development in West Africa. As the director of CDD, she oversaw its rise from being unranked in 2013 to ranked 11th out of 94 think tanks in sub-Saharan Africa in 2020, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Global Go To Think Tank Index. Idayat has strengthened CDD’s position as a civic tech leader with a portfolio of projects, including analyses of the nexus between social media platforms, election processes, and electoral outcomes, using an app to identify electoral fraud and analysing the use of personal data in political campaigning in Nigeria.