Petitions

Petitions let you add your voice to a cause. Signing is free and takes seconds.

From your phone

Everything about running a campaign or petition is now in the Ardent app. Open My campaigns and choose Manage.

Milestones are the points worth telling people about: a number of signatures, an amount raised, a date. Crossing one reaches everybody following you, which is what keeps people with you between the day you start and the day you finish.

Your team can be added, given a role, or removed. Verified Cause can be applied for. If it is a petition you can see who it is addressed to, with their contact details, and change what you are asking them for.

You can also see how far it has travelled: how many times it has been shared, and what has happened lately.

For anybody reading a petition, the record of where it has been taken now shows in the app as well as on the website, so somebody who signed can check that it actually reached the person it was addressed to.

Sign a petition

1. Open a petition on ardent.africa.
2. Read the petition, its goal, and who it is addressed to. Most petitions name several decision-makers.
3. Add your name, an optional comment, and the region you are signing from.
4. If you hold a seat in an organisation, choose whether you are signing as yourself or as it.
5. Submit. Your signature is counted immediately, and you get a proper acknowledgement rather than a message that vanishes: who it is addressed to, where the count now stands, what happens next, and a way to tell somebody.

Signing as an organisation puts its name, logo and verified badge on the signature list instead of yours. You can only do that for an organisation you genuinely hold a seat in.

Your email is never shown publicly. Petition pages show the signature count and may show signer names, regions, and comments where signers chose to share them. Adding a region helps demonstrate to decision-makers where support is concentrated.

After you sign, we keep you in the loop by email when the petition hits a milestone, when a decision-maker’s response is verified, and when the petition wins, so you can see the change your signature helped create. Everything you have signed is gathered under Petitions I signed in your dashboard.

Share a petition

Momentum matters. Use the share buttons to post a petition to WhatsApp, X, Facebook, and more. The petition page also shows momentum (signatures in the last 24 hours and this week) and celebrates milestones as they are reached.

Create a petition

Where petition creation is enabled for your account and region, the creation flow walks you through:

• A clear title and story (with best-practice tips as you write).
• A signature goal and target country.
• Decision-makers: the people or bodies with the power to act. Most petitions are addressed to more than one (a ministry, a regulator, a district assembly), so add as many as you need and put the most important one first. You can let the assistant suggest likely decision-makers, or enter them yourself. Their contact email is kept private.
• What winning looks like: the specific, concrete change you are asking for.
• Who publishes it: yourself, or an organisation you hold a seat in. Pick the organisation and the petition carries its name, logo and verified badge instead of yours, and everyone with a seat can manage it. The choice appears only if you belong to an organisation; switch workspace from your account to publish for a different one.
• A cause: what the petition is about, chosen from a shared list. People who follow that cause can find your petition, and a cause label on the page links to everything else under it. Leave it blank and we will work one out from your category.

Keeping supporters with you

Two things now reach the feeds of people who follow you, so a petition does not go quiet the moment it is published:

• Updates you post. Write one from your campaign dashboard and it appears as a card linking back to the petition. The update's title is what people see; the full text stays on the page.
• Signature milestones. Passing 100, 500, 1,000 and upward is announced once each. Crossing a milestone twice never posts twice, and a petition that is closed or unpublished stays quiet.

Both are announced by the organisation when a petition was published under one, not by whichever team member happened to write it.

Following. You can follow any campaign or petition to hear when it posts an update, whether or not you signed it. Signing offers to keep you posted rather than assuming it, and you can stop at any time from the Follow control on the page. If you signed something before this existed you are still following it, so nothing you already receive stops arriving.

You decide what your profile announces. Settings has a switch for each kind of announcement, and if you hold a seat in an organisation you can set its profile separately from your own.

See the petition guides for a full walkthrough of starting strong, building momentum, engaging decision-makers, and declaring victory.

Running your petition

Open Manage from your petition page to:

• Correct who it is addressed to. Names, titles and organisations can be changed at any time after publishing. The first person listed is the one shown on the petition page, and saving replaces the whole list, so the order you leave it in is the order people see. The private contact address you entered is visible here to you, and to nobody else.
• Set milestones. Stages supporters can see you passing: an amount, a date, or simply a stage such as "first borehole drilled". Passing one is announced to the people who follow you. You cannot mark one reached yourself, because reaching it is what makes the announcement worth anything.
• Record a delivery. When you hand the signatures over, record how, to whom and when. We stamp the signature count at that moment, so the record says what was actually delivered rather than what the total happens to be later.

Decision-maker responses

A decision-maker may respond to a petition, and a response is recorded against the specific person it came from, so you can see who has answered and who has not. Verified responses appear prominently on the petition page with a Verified response badge, giving you an on-the-record answer.

Delivering your petition and declaring victory

As the creator you can:

• Download a delivery packet (a PDF with your ask, the decision-makers, the signature count, where supporters are, and their reasons for signing) to hand over. Each delivery records which decision-maker it reached, so with several on the list you can track who has been served and who is still outstanding.
• Declare victory when a real change happens. This celebrates the win on the petition page and lets your supporters know their voice mattered.

Browse petition victories to see change won across Africa.

Last updated: 3 August 2026