Ushahidi & Small Progress on Humanitarian Efforts

It’s peak hurricane season again and we’ve already experienced a range of natural disasters from earthquake to tropical floods. Around the anniversary of Katrina and 9/11 it is natural to think of recent mega-disasters including the Asian tsunami, the Haitian and the Japanese earthquakes along with various mega droughts in African compounded by social unrest. But sometimes it brings out the best humanitarian instincts in people and leads to real improvement in how we deal with problems.

I ran across one of these humanitarian projects recently. It grew from simple blogging to a crowd sourcing system to help disaster victims. The effort was started in 2007 by Ory Okolloh, a prominent native Kenyan lawyer who blogged about post 2005 election violence in Kenya. Early in January 2007, UN agencies and other humanitarian bodies were getting general reports that tens of thousands of people had been displaced and dozens killed across the country (sort of like the reports coming out of Syria now). But in this part of the world details on the extent, location, and chronology of the violence are hard to establish. As a result humanitarian agencies had difficulties planning effective response. But Kenya turns out to have a tech savvy cadre of people and Ory’s blogs triggered responses to her reports and the possibility of war in Kenya...