---
title: Ushahidi
type: platform
status: active
country: KE
website: https://www.ushahidi.com
logo: /assets/org-logos/ushahidi.png
contact:
  checked: 2026-07-30
  form: https://www.ushahidi.com/contact
  source: https://www.ushahidi.com/contact
summary: A Kenyan-founded nonprofit (2008) that builds open-source crowdsourcing and
  crisis-mapping tools — originally created to map post-election violence in Kenya,
  now used for election monitoring, human rights documentation, and civic reporting
  worldwide.
concepts:
- democracy-tools
- e-government
- radical-transparency
- collective-intelligence
location:
  latitude: -1.2921
  longitude: 36.8219
  name: Nairobi, Kenya
  precision: city
news_page: https://www.ushahidi.com/about/blog
events:
- date: '2008-01-01'
  title: Created in the aftermath of Kenya's 2007 election crisis as a crowdsourced
    crisis-mapping platform
  url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushahidi
  quote: was created in the aftermath of Kenya's disputed 2007 presidential election
  proof_level: high
  url_checked: '2026-08-10'
  notable: true
- date: '2010-01-12'
  title: Deployed for Haiti earthquake response — mapped tens of thousands of reports,
    establishing the platform's global humanitarian use case
  url: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushahidi
  quote: in response to the Haiti Earthquake in 2010
  proof_level: high
  url_checked: '2026-08-10'
  notable: true
activity:
  dod:
    checked: 2026-07-19
    date: 2026-07-19
    note: Website live; ongoing blog posts and active climate/governance project pages.
    url: https://www.ushahidi.com
  scrape:
    checked: 2026-08-17
    date: 2024-11-12
    note: 'Latest post: The End; and the Means to that End (Angela Oduor Lungati)'
    url: https://www.ushahidi.com/about/blog
  sitemap:
    note: Sitemap found, no lastmod
    checked: 2026-08-17
last_checked: '2026-07-19'
---

Ushahidi ("testimony" in Swahili) was created in January 2008 by a group of Kenyan bloggers and technologists — including Ory Okolloh, Erik Hersman, Juliana Rotich, and David Kobia — in the immediate aftermath of Kenya's disputed presidential election and the violence that followed. Within days of launch, over 45,000 reports had been mapped. The project demonstrated that crowdsourced civic data, gathered via SMS and web submissions and plotted on a map, could provide situational awareness when official sources were failing or actively suppressing information.

The organisation became a nonprofit and open-sourced its platform. Ushahidi has since been deployed in hundreds of contexts: election observation across Africa and beyond, post-disaster coordination (Haiti earthquake 2010, Japan tsunami 2011), conflict monitoring, and local government accountability campaigns. The platform's architecture — collect, verify, visualise, act — has been widely imitated.

Ushahidi is significant for the democracy landscape because it emerged from the Global South rather than Silicon Valley, demonstrated that civic data infrastructure could be built and maintained locally, and proved that crowdsourced monitoring can operate at scale in environments where official channels are compromised.

## Key people

- **Ory Okolloh** — co-founder; lawyer and activist whose blog post calling for a crisis-mapping tool sparked the original build.
- **Erik Hersman** — co-founder; also founded iHub (Nairobi's tech hub) and BRCK.
- **Juliana Rotich** — co-founder and former executive director.

## Links

- Website: [ushahidi.com](https://www.ushahidi.com)
- Source code: [github.com/ushahidi](https://github.com/ushahidi)
- Wikipedia: [Ushahidi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ushahidi)

## See also

- [E-Government](../concepts/e-government.md)
- [Radical Transparency](../concepts/radical-transparency.md)
- [Collective Intelligence](../concepts/collective-intelligence.md)