Technology elevates Africa's global status

For a long time, disease, hunger, civil war and natural catastrophes have dominated global news on Africa. It seemed that the only image people could get was of a suffering "dark" continent -- but technology is changing all that.

People in Mexico, India and Philippines now have a different image of Africa after using the Ushahidi platform to monitor elections and monitor the use of mobile phones by citizens.

Ushahidi, which means ''testimony'' in Swahili, is a Web site and communications platform that was developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election violence in 2008. Ushahidi provided a forum for citizens to report cases of violence through text messages at a time when information was doctored by propagandists and media houses that had taken sides.

From the violence and lack of information, a software engine was born and presented to the world. Because it uses Google maps, the platform can be used in a variety of circumstances, such as during crises and routine monitoring.

The Ushahidi Engine has evolved from a response to a specific crisis to a platform that allows anyone around the world to set up their own way of gathering reports by mobile phone, e-mail and the Web and map the data using Google Maps.

The Ushahidi team -- comprising Ory Okolloh, Juliana Rotich, Erik Hersman and David Kobia -- is now polishing up a beta version that includes expanded SMS capabilities. The code is open source and anyone can take and customize it to their unique circumstance.

The Ushahidi core engine is built on the premise that gathering crisis information from the general public provides new insights into events happening in near real-time.

It has been a true collaborative effort between a group of volunteer developers and designers coming from Kenya, South Africa, Uganda, Malawi, Ghana, Netherlands and the U.S.

With Ushahidi, organizations with multiple locations can gather and share information using mobile phones and the Internet. It is turning out to be one of the best technology innovations from Africa so far.

Ushahidi has won awards because of its role during the post-election violence in Kenya but its true importance was demonstrated by others organizations, which have used the platform for various activities.

The Cuidemos el Voto mashup, an independent platform, used Ushahidi to help monitor the federal elections in Mexico last month.

The Computer Professionals' Union in the Philippines created an initiative called TXTpower, an effort to keep an eye on mobile phone companies by ordinary citizens.

Vote Report India, a collaborative citizen-driven election monitoring initiative, used the platform for the 2009 Indian general elections. Al Jazeera uses Ushahidi in their "War on Gaza" Web site covering events in Gaza in January 2009.

The monitoring of elections seems to have empowered citizens because the platform allows ordinary people to record their own stories and have their voices heard, especially in areas where information is scarce. This will be helpful in future African elections because people will now be able to report vote tallying as it happens, making doctoring of voter records a bit harder.

In Africa, the platform has been used in the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malawi, South Africa, Uganda and Zambia.

Stop Stockouts is using Ushahidi to track near real-time stockouts of medical supplies at pharmacies in Kenya, Uganda, Malawi and Zambia.

The Peace Heroes campaign, developed by Butterfly Works and the Media Focus on Africa Foundation, is using the platform to nominate people who helped do positive things during and after the post-election violence in Kenya.

Now, if only the ministry of health in Kenya could jump the bureaucratic hoops and embrace the Ushahidi platform, it might solve an ironic problem: drugs are rotting in some hospital pharmacies, the while in other hospitals there are no drugs.

As Ushahidi grows to help other countries overcome their challenges, the hope is that more government bodies will customize the software and use it to visualize and sort out a wide variety of problems.

(Rebecca Wanjiku is a correspondent for Computerworld Kenya who advises nonprofit organizations on how to deploy Ushahidi.)