Ushahidi

Ushahidi is a phone and computer application or software developed in Kenya, Africa, to collect information from the community and show it on a map. Ushahidi is a Swahili word meaning testimony or witness.

Ushahidi empowers people through citizen-generated data to develop solutions that strengthen their communities. The Ushahidi Platform helps communities turn information into action with an intuitive and accessible crowdsourcing and mapping tool. By enabling the rapid collection, management and analysis of crowdsourced information, Ushahidi empowers everyone—individuals, community groups, governments, activists, organizations—to create meaningful change.

https://www.ushahidi.com/

How Ushahidi works

On their website, Ushahidi provides users with a highly interactive website where they can create ‘questions’ for members of the community or the crowd to respond. For example, a question could be ‘share a location where COVID was reported’. Community members then enter the information (called posts) on a map using their phones or computer and all the information sourced will make a single map which people can refer to for information. Anyone can start an Ushahidi or Deployment as they call it.

Data or posts can also be added into the Ushahidi platform by administrators.

Examples where Ushahidi has been deployed worldwide

• Report violence in Kenya, United States of America, Republic of Congo and Sri Lanka.
• Report COVID in many countries.
• Report environment issues e.g. climate change or tree numbers. Imagine using Ushahidi to record indigenous trees in order to preserve them from threats posed by non-indigenous trees!
• Recording addresses of midwives including home birth midwives in the USA.
• Reporting broken water sources in Afghanistan.
• Ensuring a steady supply of food, medicine and other subsistence goods to vulnerable communities in Italy.
• Deployment by the grass root organisation Digitales por Chile. They get together to help when Natural Disasters happen in Chile and this deployment was created during the wild fires that affected the country in 2019.
• Raising awareness about violence against women and children in India.
• During the earthquake in Haiti, 40 000 posts were made including 117 reports of trapped people were made and 2730 reports of water and food shortage.

So far, since its formation in 2008, 209 public Ushahidi were deployed and these can be accessed on the app website.

How can it be used in social work and development?

• Identify issues to advocate for and seek information to support advocacy and promote action.
• Share educational resources.
• A data collection tool for research.
• A problem identification tool.
• An archive for community voices and data.
• A reference source to learn about community voices, concerns, issues and projects.
• An example of Made-in-Africa products, technology and services.
• Mapping where students are recruited or deployed for fieldwork, to ensure all communities are served.
• Mapping where graduates are employed, locally, continentally and globally.

Conclusion

Locally developed apps like Ushahidi have solved not only local but global problems, and they will continue to do so if we embrace them as Made-in-Africa-use-in-Africa digital products. More importantly, we need to look at such innovations as inspiration to develop more products that are useful for Africa and Africa-centred at the same time solving global problems.