Ushahidi
Ushahidi ("testimony" in Swahili) was created in January 2008 by a group of Kenyan bloggers and technologists — including Ory Okolloh, Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich, and David Kobia — in the immediate aftermath of Kenya's disputed presidential election and the violence that followed. Within days of launch, over 45,000 reports had been mapped. The project demonstrated that crowdsourced civic data, gathered via SMS and web submissions and plotted on a map, could provide situational awareness when official sources were failing or actively suppressing information.
The organisation became a nonprofit and open-sourced its platform. Ushahidi has since been deployed in hundreds of contexts: election observation across Africa and beyond, post-disaster coordination (Haiti earthquake 2010, Japan tsunami 2011), conflict monitoring, and local government accountability campaigns. The platform's architecture — collect, verify, visualise, act — has been widely imitated.
Ushahidi is significant for the democracy landscape because it emerged from the Global South rather than Silicon Valley, demonstrated that civic data infrastructure could be built and maintained locally, and proved that crowdsourced monitoring can operate at scale in environments where official channels are compromised.
Key people
- Ory Okolloh — co-founder; lawyer and activist whose blog post calling for a crisis-mapping tool sparked the original build.
- Erik Hersman — co-founder; also founded iHub (Nairobi's tech hub) and BRCK.
- Juliana Rotich — co-founder and former executive director.
Links
- Website: ushahidi.com
- Source code: github.com/ushahidi
- Wikipedia: Ushahidi