Our team in Accra built the whole voting experience in a day, then ran support through the night.
On 12 September 2026, thousands packed into the Major R. Owens Center in Brooklyn for a sold-out Battle of Jollof VI. The annual event is centred around a basketball game between rivals Nigeria and Ghana, with Afrobeats, food, a market and, of course, the argument that has been running between West Africans for as long as most people can remember. Who makes the best jollof?
Monterosa partnered with the event and ran the public vote. Our team in Accra built the whole voting experience in a day and we ran our support operation through the night to support the team on the ground.
Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal: pick one and be counted
Battle of Jollof started in 2020, taking the Ghana v Nigeria jollof argument and turning it into a live cultural event built around food, basketball and music.
The basketball was Ghana against Nigeria and Nigeria took the trophy.
Off the court, three chefs were competing:
Ghana: Chef Akwasi Brenya-Mensa
Nigeria: Chef Ope Amosu
Senegal: Chef Pierre Thiam
The competition was adjudicated partly by a blindfolded judging panel. With thousands of people in the building, plenty of them arriving with very firm opinions already, the organisers wanted the crowd to have their say too.
Judging at Battle of Jollof VI. Photograph via Complex.
So we gave them a vote, and made that vote count in the panel aggregate.
One QR code and a single choice to make
The setup was deliberately simple. QR codes were printed and available around the venue. Scan it and you saw the three chefs. Pick one and vote, that's it. No registration or special security barriers.
That simplicity matters in a situation like this: people are busy having fun and don't want friction. You do not have much time to persuade someone in that situation to stop what they are doing and go through a process, so we simply built a scan, pick, done journey.
What happens behind the scenes is more complex.
The vote runs on Monterosa / Interaction Cloud, the same platform we use for major sports and entertainment voting experiences. It features vote analysis and detection that allows us to eliminate suspect voting. Rather than rely on logging people in, the algorithm detects patterns that look like coordinated or bot voting. Thankfully there was no foul play, although some of those moves on the court were a different matter.
Built in a day with the Monterosa CLI
This was also a useful test of a different way of building experiences fast at Monterosa.
We have recently introduced new CLI tooling for setting up and managing Monterosa applications from Claude Code or Codex. For Battle of Jollof, our Accra team used that tooling to set up the application and build the voting experience in under a day. They took the style guides from the team and in under an hour had extracted the design tokens and assets, and set the whole thing up from Claude Code.
That's quite different from a lot of our larger projects, which might run alongside a broadcaster, league or sports organisation for weeks or months before launch. It's a sign of things to come.
Here was a single event with this fun but important vote, and we turned it round near instantly.
That is exactly the sort of thing we want the new tooling to make easier: taking an idea and getting a proper Monterosa-powered experience in front of fans quickly, without turning every activation into a large technical project.
Battle of Jollof VI took place at the Major R. Owens Center in Brooklyn on 12 September 2026, and we're thankful to the whole organising team for letting us play our small part. The event is at battleofjollof.com.
And, for the avoidance of doubt, while Monterosa's Ghana team built and ran the voting experience, we had absolutely nothing to do with deciding which country makes the best jollof. Ghana won the prize on merit, as it should have done!
