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.
There was basketball, Afrobeats, food, a market and 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 only one
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.
This year three chefs were competing:
Ghana: Chef Akwasi Brenya-Mensa
Nigeria: Chef Ope Amosu
Senegal: Chef Pierre Thiam
The basketball was Ghana against Nigeria and Nigeria took the trophy.
The jollof was a bit more complicated!
The official competition was decided by a blindfolded judging panel with fan votes contributing to the decision. 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.
One QR code
The setup was deliberately simple.
A QR code appeared on the big screen. Scan it and you saw the three chefs. Pick one and vote.
No downloads or registration.
That simplicity mattered in the room. People were eating, talking, watching the basketball, taking photos and moving around. Some were voting with a plate in the other hand.
You do not have much time to persuade someone in that situation to stop what they are doing and interact with something on their phone.
Scan. Pick. Done.
The vote ran on Monterosa / Interaction Cloud, the same platform we use for major sports and entertainment voting experiences. It features detection that eliminates suspect voting, of which thankfully there was none.
Built in a day
This was also a useful test of a different way of building experiences at Monterosa.
We have recently introduced new CLI tooling for setting up Monterosa applications. For Battle of Jollof, our Accra team used that tooling to set up the application and build the voting experience in under a day.
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.
Here there was one event, one room and one night.
We built it, got it live and supported the vote while it was happening.
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. The event is at battleofjollof.com.
And, for the avoidance of doubt, while Monterosa's Accra 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 alone, as is correct.
