me I had just turned 18
and I was excited at the thought of
having a say in deciding the kind of
leadership I wanted for my country I
woke up on the 27th of December stood in
line for possibly six hours before I got
to cast my vote but I didn’t care I was
this excited a few hours after voting I
was glued to the TV screens because I
was eager to get to see the results and
get to know what my civic participation
had actually brought out the first day
passed and results trickled in slowly
but I wasn’t fazed because I assumed
that the Electoral Commission of Kenya
had things covered but when the second
day and the third day passed with
results trickling in extremely slowly I
got anxious I knew something was wrong
results from different media houses were
extremely inconsistent everybody had
their own tally had their own figures of
who was winning and who wasn’t winning
which made me think that the media was
out there to serve the politicians as
opposed to serving the Kenyan population
a few days later on December 30th 2007
the results were announced followed by a
hasty swearing-in ceremony and a dark
cloud formed over this country violence
broke out in different parts of Kenya
and some of the unconformity ports that
we were all receiving were chilling the
media still was unable to tell us what
was going on our country was literally
burning and they’re playing cartoons on
live television
our newly installed government was
trying to bury our heads in the sand and
tell us that everything was okay
downplaying how severe the situation was
a group of four Kenyan bloggers for Rio
Colo Juliana rootage Erik Hersman and
David cobia decided to build a tool that
would allow for ordinary canyons like
myself to share messages of what was
happening
around them they built a tool that
allowed for ordinary Kenyans to send in
messages about human rights violations
depths riots effectively giving them a
voice where no one else could or would
they built a Shahidi who Shahid is an
open-source platform that allows for
ordinary citizens to collect meaningful
data get the real-time pulse respond to
issues and most importantly to tell
their stories it allows the collection
of data by SMS email Twitter the web
platform as well as smartphone
applications this tool is named after a
Swahili word that means testimony this
tool catalyze a paradigm shift in how
information flows in the world
it gave rest the notion that people can
speak up and can be heard it gave people
an opportunity to raise their voices
after the initial map a lot of people
across the world started reaching out to
the ocean Healey team to use the
platform as a way of including having
people included in conversations as
opposed to being excluded in matters
affecting their lives from crisis
response to human rights mapping from
election monitoring to citizen
journalism and even environmental
mapping this tool was being used across
entire world to raise the voices or
people who are considered to be passive
recipients of information now during the
Russians as of 2010 the platform was
used not as a way of mapping out the faz
themselves but as a way of connecting
citizens who are in need with the
resources they require when disasters
tend to hit it’s very hard for those who
need to get the help that they need and
not quake hit Haiti in January of 2010
causing massive infrastructure damage
which meant that humanitarian responders
were not able to get to those who needed
the help in time or were not able to
figure out what they needed a group of
volunteers who
go by the name stand by task force came
together to deploy the platform as a
means of connecting people in need with
the people who can help them messages
would come in via SMS into the platform
they would translate it from Creole into
English and push that over to
humanitarian responders which aji Li was
revolutionizing the concept of crisis
response this was the first time that
humanitarian organizations like the Red
Cross were able to communicate in a
real-time fashion with people on the
ground and get them the resources that
they needed this story isn’t quite
different from what happened earlier
this year as well on April 25th 2015 a
massive earthquake hit the people of
Nepal causing destruction of a lot of
property many people were killed and
tens of thousands injured a group of
people working for Kathmandu living labs
and volunteering with another group
called Nepal monitor decided to deploy
Shahidi one more time as a means of
coordinating response and making sure
that there were no assumptions being
made around what people needed as
opposed to sending out blankets when
people need food making sure that those
are clear a clear communication line
between the ordinary citizens and the
people who needed help from them they
were able to collect more than 2,000
reports and create action out of one out
of every three reports that were coming
in they were able to transform
collection of data into meaningful
action to create impact in their
communities let’s move on to another
different news case during the Egyptian
revolution we shall he played an
important role in documenting the
elections documenting the January 25th
revolution and also documenting the
constitutional amendments the group of
people who deployed Shahidi in Egypt
were well aware that the map would have
been taken down but they didn’t care
because they wanted to show the world
what was happening on the ground and
similarly in Libya the standby task
force as well as un OCHA deployed the
platform once again as a means of
providing a better situational awareness
of what exactly was happening on the
ground this is one of my favorite
examples of the use of Ushahidi because
it’s something that touch is very
closely to my own heart as a woman the
founders of harassment or tired of being
hounded on the streets of Egypt you know
you walk around and people are harassing
you all the time and you’re unable to
speak up because you feel like speaking
up will not make a difference because
Society has accepted it as a status quo
they decided to deploy a Shahid II as a
means of not only creating awareness
about sexual harassment against women
but also changing the conversation so
that we’re getting to the point where we
are creating some sort of behavioral
change
getting people to know about how deeply
rooted this issue is in our countries
and how it’s affecting the lives of
women and trying to reset the
relationship between women and men in
Egypt they’ve done a lot of studies and
have conducted a lot of community
working groups and sessions to try and
also change the mindset of the men who
are actually perpetuating this and
trying to make sure that people
understand that sexual harassment is
something that we should not accept now
because of our history elections in
general and Kenyan elections in
particular are something that are very
important to the team at we Shahidi
if there’s one group of people who
should hate elections its Kenyans
because during elections you lose
property
you lose friendships and sadly people
lose their lives you’d think that we
would think that
Kenyans hate politics by now but we
don’t we relish it and because we love
politics and we love elections let’s try
and have good ones so in 2013 once again
Ushahidi deployed a modified version of
the platform and named it which are
busey which is a Swahili word for
elections but this time it was a little
different as opposed to a reactionary
response to something that was going on
we decided that we were going to use it
as a
venting measure to make sure that what
happened in 2007 never happens again our
strategy was to tap into the collective
intelligence of the crowd to collect
data and help every Kenyan protect their
boots once we collected that data we
were able to verify it and after that
escalated to people who would be able to
do something about it whether it’s I
walked into my polling station and it
wasn’t opened on time for that over to
the IABC or there’s a group of people
collecting with pandas near polling
station for that over to law enforcement
agencies so that they’re able to do
something about it we were able to see
more than 5,000 messages received about
90% of these being ludley from SMS
across this entire country I think we
actually did a lot to help Kenyans
protect their votes now these are really
really powerful examples of how a
Shaheed is being used to escalate or
amplify the voices of people who are
passive recipients in ur to be passive
recipients of information than
90-thousand maps out there right now
actually more than 90,000 maps this
platform has been deployed in more than
150 countries and translated into more
I think that all these maps have one
thing in common these maps have
capitalized on one theory that it takes
something that that affects you directly
to make you think about acting and
solving a problem in your community so
let me try to explain this a little
further let’s assume that this is a
pothole in your community and every day
you’re driving past it’s it’s it
scratches the underground it scratches
the body of your car or better yet since
Kenya’s a wok ignition every time you’re
walking by a street with El Nino coming
along if the the pothole is filled with
water every time a car passes by water
splashed on you
or better yet every time you’re sitting
in that much of going to work or going
wherever you’re going every time it goes
over that bump you hit your head when
the local government decides to fix this
pothole that really is news it’s
something that you get really excited
about news about a part of being fixed
in Uganda really it doesn’t affect you
much it’s not something that touches you
close to your heart the common factor
between all these different maps is the
fact that they were able to identify
issues that people on the ground really
care about and they’ve been able to
collect so much data and create
meaningful impact in the communities
through that now our incoming executive
director which I highly doubt devera
once told me that technology can be more
powerful than throwing stones more
radical than throwing stones and that’s
true true testament to that is looking
at the number of maps we’ve seen being
deployed for Shahidi but this one
disclaimer it’s not just about the
technology technology contributes just
about 10 percent of the success of any
initiative without the human interaction
without the planning behind it
technology’s mute so we always need to
think about
ninety-percent look at technology not as
a complete solution to your problem
problem my apologies but something that
amplifies your your solution which
brings me to the next point insight from
data can be used to leapfrog right data
can be used to drive a lot of decisions
in our countries in our homes to help us
make better decisions
however we should always look at and use
this analogy of a farm the data data are
seeds platforms Laquisha he exists to
help you understand to help you help
create access to information to help
make the data ingestible you know if
forced to give you a spreadsheet right
now with a lot of numbers on it it’ll
seem boring but you being able to log on
and look at it on a map or visualize it
it really helps you make sense out of
what exactly is being said but all of
that the data and the platforms are
meaningless without people we need to
tap into the intelligence of local
people I know that in this world we
always tend to think about people as
uneducated in some sense and assume that
we are the ones who know everything
that’s going on and don’t pay attention
to the context the local people have
that context let’s capitalize on their
knowledge and finally a society that
gives people a second chance is a
late 2007 was a very dark time for
Kenyans it was a very dark time in
Kenyan history 2008 was the second
chance for Kenya looking at a tool that
was built out of problems you always
tend to associate with Africa low
bandwidth bad governance and seeing the
kind of impact it was creating across
entire world the map you are seeing
behind here all those dots on the map
represent a single post shared by a
voice that would have otherwise been
silent I think that’s extremely powerful
and we should be extremely proud of our country thank you