Ushahidi

Ushahidi is a global non profit technology company providing software and services to numerous sectors and civil society. Through its offerings, marginalized people are empowered to raise their agggregated voices and those who serve them to listen and respond better while simultaneously bringing global attention to their problems.

Angela Oduor Lungati, Executive Director. A technologist, community builder and open-source software advocate with over 10 years experience in software development, global community engagement, and non-profit organizational management.

We are regularly seeing natural and man-made disasters that encumber many of government’s resources. When this happens, there are gaps in the response and recovery of communities. 

Common challenges faced in global health, such as poor health systems and resource scarcity, are often exasperated in humanitarian disasters and conflict settings. The COVID-19 crisis has exposed the vulnerabilities of individuals, societies and economies, calling for a rethink of how economic and social activities are organised. The crisis calls for strong responses based on solidarity, co-operation and responsibility, for instance, crowdsourcing. 

Specifically to health fields (applied in public health - health promotion), use of crowdsourcing has been growing. Yet, this approach has mainly been applied in high-income countries (HICs) and there is a lack of application in low - and middle-income countries (LMICs). As traditional epidemiological data reporting and warning systems generally have a one- to two-week lag time, sometimes extending to months, real-time reporting is invaluable, especially for outbreaks of severe infectious diseases, such as the current COVID-19 pandemic.

Finally, as publications are often delayed by an average of two years, funding agencies and donors who are basing funding decisions on published data may be targeting interventions based on outdated data.

Anyone can use Ushahidi, but traditionally it has been a tool used by crisis responders, human rights reporters, and citizens & governments (such as election monitoring or corruption reporters). We also serve environmental mappers, asset monitoring, citizen journalism, international development, etc.

Citizens are crowdsourcing in times of disaster.  Thus through Ushahidi, we seek to support those who deploy it by providing an online, distributed, problem-solving, and production model that uses the collective intelligence of networked communities to provide answers to complicated problems for which solutions are not yet available by combining top-down, traditional project management with bottom-up, open innovation principles. 

Hence the benefits of deploying Ushahidi in self-organization processes in natural and man made disaster governance are reflected in three perspectives: strengthening communication and coordination, optimizing emergency decision-making, and improving the ability to learn and adapt. 

We engage with the deployers to generate social impact; encourage institutionalisation of new social practices; combine efforts/strengths of different organizations, disciplines and sectors and extend beyond innovation to include implementation and capacity building of all participating actors and institutions as it’s embedded in the realities and dynamics of local and social contexts.

Ushahidi is an open-source platform increasing availability and affordability, thereby providing the most vulnerable with the voice and ability to exercise their civic rights. Our tools are built from and use a mix of Python, PHP, Javascript, Ionic, and ultimately any technologies that will allow us to improve the software we make for those that need to use it, provided we can support the fundamental tenet of being open source.

In response to the growing need for platforms like ours to surface additional information and support coordination efforts, since the outset of COVID, we offered our basic deployment plan for free, allowing users access to the platform’s complete feature set. Additionally, we introduced low-cost options, thereby further expanding the platform’s reach leading to an increased demand for the tool.

We have also contributed a module on crowdsourcing data, that is part of a larger effort by The Governance Lab (The GovLab) at the New York University Tandon School of Engineering’s massive open online course on “Collective Crisis Intelligence”, to help institutions improve disaster response through the use of data and volunteer participation.

Ushahidi amplifies marginalized people’s voices to get the help they need through data driven decision making. These are people in the midst of destruction due to natural disasters, whose human rights are threatened, and others witnessing violence, corruption or harassment. Further, they have been excluded from conversations and decision-making in matters affecting them.

For example, the DREAMS Innovation Challenge (2016-2018) was a program  whose focus was on equipping implementing partner organisations [development organisations working in Kenya and Uganda to reduce the rate of new HIV infections in Adolescent Girls and Young Women (AGYW)]; use and adopt new and appropriate technologies which in turn facilitate and increase avenues of interaction between these organisations and their target beneficiaries. The partner organisations would then use feedback gathered from their target groups, through  Ushahidi technology, to improve decision making during programme implementation. 

Further, Ushahidi notably contributed to changes in institutional policies and frameworks across partner organisations. The intervention successfully supported partners to collect accurate and timely data. It has inspired acquisition of new innovative tools such as a hotline to report sexual gender based violence cases at Global Communities. 80% of project partners made at least one programming decision based on platform feedback data.

In the last 13 years, we have collected over 50million plus reports from ordinary citizens. Over the next one year, we want to continue to strengthen our efforts in supporting COVID-19 response and recovery efforts which we began by waiving the fees for our hosted service indefinitely. 

For the next three years, some highlights of the priorities we aspire to achieve in order to scale include:

1. Adapting our products to better serve end users and provide better support to enable broad reach:

• Inclusion of marginalised groups: Improve digital and data security on our tools: by collaborating with external groups to create more documentation and tools that help keep our users safe and protect their digital privacy rights. 

• Create opportunities for collaboration and learning amongst users of our tools: Lead in creating a virtual learning hub where users and contributors can share their experiences for others to learn from.  

2. Strengthen the foundation for a long-lasting and impactful organisation

• Business Model: We’d like to develop a solid business model that will augment and not distract from our core mission and work and allow us to continue providing our tools at no cost to those who need them the most. 

We work closely with our deployers, their beneficiaries, as well as our open source community to get a better understanding of how we could better serve them. We run interviews with key informants in our partner organisations who work directly with our platform. 

Thereafter, the in-depth analysis provides us with a wealth of information on the experiences not only of our partners, as they use the Ushahidi platform to reach their beneficiaries, but also from citizens on the ground on the extent to which their needs are met.

These interviews help us gain feedback on: 

• What effect the Ushahidi platform has on the efficiency and effectiveness of partner response efforts.

• Qualitative output such as the number of beneficiaries reached and impacted.

• Whether platform functionalities meet their expectations. 

We also measure:

• Number of organisations using our tools

• Number of deployments of Ushahidi created, distributed by region

• Number of reports collected across all deployments and their status

• Disaggregated data based on sources of this data i.e reports collected by SMS, Email, Twitter, Web and smartphone apps

• Number of beneficiaries reached

• The time it takes from report submission to action taken

• Decisions/Policies developed based on data collected on Ushahidi platforms

• System: Financially -We are constantly balancing between spending time raising funds to sustain the work vs actually focusing on user needs. Technically keeping the platform's design simple, engaging and enjoyable for users. 

• Human/cultural: Humans forms a large portion of the functioning of crowdsourcing platforms— the clients, the users or the crowdsourcers. It's difficult to predict individual behavior. The right kind of motivation (both extrinsic such as monetary benefits and intrinsic - working to contribute for the betterment of the society) is important for success of any deployment. Digital divide - more than half of the world still do not have access to the internet but also unequal access to new communication technologies. 

• Capacity: We have a very lean team of 11 people that are working over and beyond to support our users, and are on the brink of burnout more often than not. It also means we have to juggle priorities and make tough choices on what we can/cannot do. Inadequate resources also makes it hard to try and bring on new talent.

• Changing tech landscape: Finding a balance between staying up to date with current technologies and chasing after new shiny tools that can be, sometimes, challenging. 

Omidyar Network, CISCO, Ford Foundation, Google.org, Humanity United, MacArthur Foundation, Rockefeller Foundation, Knight Foundation, USAID, Bylo Chacon Foundation.

With the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we’ve supported local communities who’ve come together for relief and support especially with the instituted lockdowns. The pandemic has given us an in to the health sphere and through the Trinity Challenge, we gain entry into the health ecosystem thereby allowing our solution to grow and scale to support various health initiatives through data and analytics.  

Further with the funding opportunity, we will be able to maximize the expertise of emerging and existing relevant technologies, enhance our platform, build our internal capacity to focus on shock response and adaptive management for long term impact as opposed to short term projects due to limited funding. 

The Trinity Challenge ecosystem provides a ripe opportunity for Ushahidi to connect with like minded visionaries to collaborate with and strengthen Ushahidi’s core value add of:

• Exposing the scale and variability of health problems and consequently the changeability of solutions depending on the context.

• Unearthing how to best sustain essential health services over the long-term.

• Providing the platform on how to reach people most in need.

• Showcase the integration of health with other aspects such as WASH.

Global challenges of poverty, health, etc., sit at the intersection of many disciplines requiring collaboration of resources, expertise and like minded vision organizations coming together to identify issues, find solutions and drive change. Affiliating with organizations such as Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that build such partnerships, we will be able to be part of the ecosystem enabling a complete interdependent and effective loop. 

Ushahidi provides a platform for citizen journalism/advocacy. Internews who seek to empower people worldwide with trustworthy, high-quality news and information needed to make informed decisions, participate in their communities, and hold power to account. Collaborating with Internews would greatly benefit our deployers as they would gain the know-how of unearthing and amplifying the voices of the most vulnerable. 

Many member organizations such as Microsoft, the new Data and Society Programme under Patrick J. McGovern Foundation, Bluedot, Cuebiq, Zenysis; empower response to crisis through data using AI, powerful analytics, etc. These organizations are critical in helping us build our resiliency by fostering technical capacity and enriched data use cultures and accelerate our mission.

Partnering with the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation of various health related researches via crowdsourcing is an avenue to explore too.