Crowdsourcing Gaining Momentum in Africa

This article is a guest post by Munya Chiura. He is with Grow VC, a global, transparent, community-based platform dedicated to entrepreneurs and investors. Grow VC enables great ideas and great teams to get visibility with the right investing audience, funding and support.

Crowdsourcing in recent years has gained significant traction around the globe. The premise behind it is the concept of maximizing or utilising masses of individuals to solve a large problem. The most visible and popular application of crowdsourcing is Wikipedia; the free collaborative online encyclopedia which relies on volunteers all around the world and now has over 20 million articles in English in the encyclopedia.

In Africa, we are also seeing some innovative ways in which crowdsourciing is being utilised. In Kenya for example, Ushahidi put Africa’s crowdsourcing on the map, as its platform was effectively used to monitor the 2002 Kenya elections. In Zambia, BongoHive, the country’s first tech hub, has created an exciting user-generated online map which reflects the number of tech business incubation hubs that have been set up around Africa. Closer to home in Kubanata, a Zimbabwean human rights and civic organization leveraged crowdsourcing to gather information to map the Typhoid cases in Zimbabwe, providing critical data to assist with managing the epidemic...