Ushahidi (Kenya)

Ushahidi was founded in 2008 in Nairobi. In December 2007, Kenya's presidential election erupted into a fraud dispute, and the country fell into violence — more than a thousand people died, three hundred thousand were displaced, and traditional media couldn't keep pace with events. Kenyan lawyer Ory Okolloh asked one question on her blog: was there a techie willing to build a mashup plotting where the violence and destruction were happening, using Google Maps? Programmer David Kobia, tech blogger Erik Hersman, and software engineer Juliana Rotich picked up the idea and, using the Google Maps API, PHP, and an open-source SMS tool called FrontlineSMS, built the first prototype in four days on close to zero budget. They named the tool Ushahidi — Swahili for "testimony." The 2010 Haiti earthquake turned Ushahidi from a one-off election tool into global crisis-response infrastructure. The U.S. State Department and the UN reached out directly; volunteers translated Haitian Creole SMS reports into English and mapped nearly forty thousand reports covering more than four thousand distinct incidents, helping locate trapped people and supply gaps. Ushahidi has since been used for election monitoring in Nigeria, the 2010 BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, humanitarian tracking during the Syrian civil war, and relief coordination after the 2015 Nepal earthquake. To address the problem of unverifiable crowdsourced information, the team later introduced a multi-channel verification system that cross-checks government reports, news sources, and citizen reports against each other. Today, Ushahidi's open-source platform has been deployed in more than 160 countries, backed by funders including the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Google.org, and USAID. In 2013 it won a MacArthur "Genius Grant." Built in a matter of days on almost no budget, this crisis tool redefined what an ordinary person could do when disaster strikes — no need to wait for a formal institution: a phone and a text message is enough to become a coordinate on the relief map.