Technology Transforming Elections in Africa

This article is a follow up to a previous article on ‘The Influence of Technology on Governance in Africa‘ in which we observed how technology is shaping how governments operate, how citizens expect their governments to operate, and the interaction … Read More

Kenya’s Propensity to Crowdsource

About two weeks ago, following a strike by transport operators in Kenya, residents of the capital city Nairobi resorted to social media to solve the problem. The hashtag #CarPoolKE was a result of an emergent self-organised effort by Twitter users … Read More

Three lessons for innovators & techpreneurs: Learning from Ushahidi's history

The Ushahidi crowdsourcing platform recently secured an additional $1.9 million round of funding from the Omidyar Network spanning 3 years.

Ushahidi has definitely grown from strength to strength since 2008 when it was created and first deployed, really as a hack creating a … Read More

Africa Social Networking/Social Media Pulse Check

Back in 2008, in an article on socialmediatoday.com titled ‘Why Social Media in South Africa Will Fail’, the author makes a rather daring assertion:

… social media and social media marketing and social media strategy is an almost pointless pursuit … Read More

Ushahidi iPhone and iPad App Review

Ushahidi has grown from a web based crisis information crowdsourcing application to quite a comprehensive ecosystem of apps and tools that can be leveraged in disaster situations to crowdsource critical information.

We recently downloaded the Ushahidi iPhone/iPad app and gave … Read More

Africa Programmers Survey Results

It is evident from our writing that tech startups and innovation are central to the growth of Africa and African economies. At the heart of tech and innovation in tech are the actual guys who create the cool apps and … Read More

Ushahidi Makes Datasets Available

Ushahidi are making a number of datasets available from some of the past deployments of the platform to monitoring crisis around the world. The datasets range from Afghanistan to Haiti to Mexico and Sudan and more. The data is provided … Read More

South Africa’s JamiiX set to be the next Ushahidi

South Africa’s JamiiX looks set to be the next Ushahidi to emerge onto a global stage from the African continent. While Ushahidi uses social media and mobile communications very cleverly to collect information from the people at the scene of … Read More

KuweniSerious: Fighting the Evil Forces of Apathy

KuweniSerious was started by three young Kenyans in the wake of the Kenyan post election violence back in 2007/08. Just like the founders of the famed Ushahidi, these young people thought there was more that could be done than just … Read More

Ushahidi starts 2011 with a bang announcing Crowdmap Checkins

As we did our 2010 year reviews (Jan – June and July – December), one thing that stood out was the fact that the Ushahidi team seemed to have something major going on literally every month of 2010. And as … Read More