What Africa can teach us about place

Written byErik Hersman. 2 comments

Erik Hersman

Erik Hersman is co-founder of Ushahidi, a web app created to map reports of violence during the post-election crisis in Kenya. Currently, he works with a team of mostly-African programmers to use what they have learned from building Ushahidi to create a free and open source engine that makes it easier to crowdsource and visualise crisis information.

What's going to happen when the barriers, access and ability to sift information are equal for every individual around the world?

In the colo­nial ‘scram­ble for Africa’ in the late 19th cen­tury France wanted to own every­thing from Dakar to Dji­bouti and drew a line between the two from East to West divid­ing Africa’s North from its South. Con­cur­rently, Britain owned Cape Town and Cairo and drew another line con­nect­ing the two and divid­ing East from West. These two lines bisected in a dusty lit­tle unknown town called Fashoda, which is now known as Kodok, in Sudan.

I first heard this story from Edward Storcher, a won­der­ful sto­ry­telling ICT con­sul­tant who also grew up in Africa. It’s a story of out­siders talk­ing about and plan­ning for a vil­lage that had no idea it was the cen­ter of the world’s atten­tion back in 1898. He says, ‘Every­one else is talk­ing about them, every­one else knows some of the issues they’ve got. Quite often, they’re the last peo­ple to find out what’s going on.’

You can find the full talk by Edward at http://​vimeo​.com/​2​7​5​2​747. It’s well worth lis­ten­ing to for so many rea­sons, only one of which I will high­light here: com­mu­ni­ca­tion. Specif­i­cally, the lack of com­mu­ni­ca­tion that brought about the birth of a new plat­form, a web and mobile appli­ca­tion for crowd­sourc­ing cri­sis infor­ma­tion from the peo­ple on the ground who know what is hap­pen­ing around them.

The birth of Ushahidi

Ushahidi, which means ‘tes­ti­mony’ in Swahili, is the orga­ni­za­tion I co-​​founded with a num­ber of other Kenyans. It was born out of the tur­bu­lence that ripped through Kenya in Jan­u­ary 2008 in the wake of a botched elec­tion. In the midst of the mad­ness and destruc­tion we quickly deployed a web­site that gave every Kenyan a voice. Using their mobile phone or the inter­net peo­ple could report inci­dents of vio­lence, or peace, hap­pen­ing around them. These inci­dents were then placed on a map at the Ushahidi site, so any­one could quickly see what was going on, and where. Ushahidi was a way for every­one to tell their sto­ries when the media was silent, or look­ing else­where. A way to tell the world what was really happening.

In the very first week of deploy­ing the new site, we had sto­ries com­ing in from places well out of the nor­mal con­text. Sto­ries like the game ranger who was hid­ing a num­ber of women and chil­dren in the for­est and who needed food, water and other relief (and who we heard was even­tu­ally helped by some­one who found his report on Ushahidi). There were other sto­ries, not all of mur­der, may­hem and burn­ing build­ings. Some were of peace efforts that were tak­ing place such as the story of Rachel Kung’u, of Peace Car­a­van, who used her exten­sive net­work of youth activists around the coun­try to make inroads and start nego­ti­a­tions where not even the big NGOs, like the Red Cross, could go.

Near the end of Feb­ru­ary, about seven weeks after the vio­lence had started, things started to set­tle down. Though we hadn’t built any major track­ing mech­a­nism into Ushahidi’s orig­i­nal pro­to­type, we had served over 120,000 page views and col­lected almost two hun­dred reports. Most impor­tantly, we had raised aware­ness, and helped to make sense of, the sit­u­a­tion on the ground in Kenya.

As every­one knows, the mobile phone’s entry into Africa in the mid-​​90s set off a firestorm of change across a con­ti­nent primed and ready for a way to coun­ter­act the ram­pant inef­fi­cien­cies brought about by cor­rup­tion and bureau­cracy. What Ushahidi does is to pro­vide a way for a web of infor­ma­tion to grow out­side the sta­tus quo, using those devices that every­body car­ries in their pockets.

Through exam­ples like Ushahidi in Kenya, you see this phe­nom­e­non at work in the polit­i­cal and human­i­tar­ian space. How­ever, it’s not just in that sec­tor where we see mobiles enabling extra­or­di­nary changes. We can also look to mobile bank­ing and pay­ment ser­vices like Mpesa (Kenya) and Wiz­zit (South Africa) and see quan­tifi­able changes in the way busi­nesses are oper­at­ing. When I was grow­ing up in Kenya, it used to take three years to get a phone line into your res­i­dence or busi­ness. Now, all any­one has to do is walk out to the street cor­ner and pur­chase a $20 phone and a SIM card. The fun­da­men­tal com­mu­ni­ca­tions model has changed, and it effects everything.

Ordi­nary Africans, be they small town rural vil­lagers in places like Kodok, or urban­ites in a bustling metrop­o­lis like Nairobi, have access to tools that are cre­at­ing a sea-​​change in the con­trol and flow of infor­ma­tion. It no longer mat­ters that the gov­ern­ment cre­ates a media black­out, as they did in Kenya dur­ing the post-​​election vio­lence. Ushahidi has shown that Africans them­selves can con­tinue to con­nect and com­mu­ni­cate over vast dis­tances, thereby bet­ter under­stand­ing the big­ger pic­ture of what is hap­pen­ing around them. We are only at the begin­ning of this change, but the future is start­ing to make itself clear.

Ushahidi, Africa and the chang­ing world

To truly under­stand Ushahidi, you have to under­stand our roots in Africa. The chal­lenges brought about by bad gov­er­nance, poverty, low-​​bandwidth (all the neg­a­tive things you asso­ciate with Africa) also pro­vide an incred­i­ble oppor­tu­nity. The devel­op­ers who are com­ing up with solu­tions in Africa, the ones who are writ­ing soft­ware or hack­ing hard­ware, are cre­at­ing for some of the harsh­est envi­ron­ments and use-​​cases in the world. We live by this mantra: If it works in Africa, it will work anywhere.

Our chal­lenge is to get peo­ple to real­ize that there is a real com­pet­i­tive advan­tage to devel­op­ing and test­ing soft­ware in Africa. The devel­op­ment con­di­tions are unre­li­able and the envi­ron­ment is harsh. It isn’t fun to work off slow inter­net con­nec­tions or deal with expen­sive and poor mobile phone net­works. All of these things, and more, make just the tech­no­log­i­cal side of devel­op­ing in Africa a chal­lenge, which is why it’s also a par­tic­u­larly good place to try new things.

If we embrace these hand­i­caps, we might find that there’s a silver-​​lining inside. Africa turns from being a place to avoid, to being a great loca­tion to test new ideas and appli­ca­tions, and build for robust­ness and real-​​world use.

This means that we should focus first on mobile phones, then on the inter­net. From the begin­ning, Ushahidi has been about let­ting ordi­nary peo­ple use what’s in their pocket, their mobile phone, to send in reports hap­pen­ing around them. The mobile phone is the default device. We’ve focused on mobile-​​only inter­ac­tion as a basic tenet, and cre­ated a plat­form that serves the devel­op­ing world first. But we want to offer that plat­form to the West as some­thing that they can use too.

Recently we have seen an increased dis­cus­sion of the mobiles vs PCs debate, but I actu­ally see this as a false dichotomy. We know what peo­ple are using right now in places like Africa — mobiles, and we also know what can be done when we build database-​​driven ser­vices for high-​​bandwidth inter­net con­nec­tions. Both these things are needed and both are good. And Both will be used in Africa even­tu­ally. How­ever, as Steve Song of the Shut­tle­worth Foun­da­tion states:

I think there is a temp­ta­tion to pick one tech­nol­ogy that is going to ‘save’ the devel­op­ing world but the real­ity is that there are going to be many solu­tions. The only thing that we need to be absolutely clear on is that every­thing should run on the Inter­net Pro­to­col (IP).

Mobiles, even sim­ple SMS only phones like those found in Africa, are already being used to get the word out dur­ing tense times. We saw it with Ushahidi in Kenya. Then we saw it again in Zimbabwe’s elec­tion, where ordi­nary Zim­bab­weans were cap­tur­ing pic­tures of the count tally at polling sta­tions. And now we have seen it most recently in Mum­bai, Gaza and Iran. These were all hot-​​flash polit­i­cal emer­gen­cies, and main­stream media is trou­bled, as are many experts and gov­ern­ment offi­cials, by how empow­ered ordi­nary peo­ple have become in gath­er­ing, dis­sem­i­nat­ing and ampli­fy­ing infor­ma­tion in ways that just weren’t pos­si­ble before.

If any­thing, the ter­ror­ist attacks in Mum­bai has brought home the fact that we are all part of a sea change in news and infor­ma­tion flow and trans­parency. The bar­ri­ers are now so low that any­one can tell their story, and the whole world can see it live – in real time. There is no stop­ping this change in infor­ma­tion dynam­ics, there is only har­ness­ing it in ways that make it a level play­ing field.

What we’re see­ing is that it’s no longer a one-​​to-​​many mass broad­cast envi­ron­ment, it’s now a mass-​​broadcast to mass-​​broadcast envi­ron­ment. In Kenya, rightly or wrongly, the gov­ern­ment wanted to shut down the mobile phone infra­struc­ture so that mes­sages incit­ing vio­lence couldn’t be sent. They even­tu­ally saw this couldn’t work. How do you stop 6 mil­lion SMS mes­sages with­out crip­pling your own busi­nesses, infra­struc­ture and abil­ity to get work done?

The answer is not to take it down or make peo­ple share less — that will never hap­pen and it’s a short-​​term solu­tion at best. Instead, we need to fig­ure out ways to har­ness infor­ma­tion from an even greater num­ber of peo­ple, and make this infor­ma­tion even more useful.

Ushahidi is here to make this whole process more open, with a plat­form that any­one can get started on. Using what we’ve learned from build­ing Ushahidi, our goal is to do one thing very well: cre­ate an engine that makes it easy to crowd­source cri­sis information.

Turn­ing the tables

Ushahidi is now a free and open source soft­ware project, with devel­op­ers scat­tered all over the world, but with a strong cen­tral core work­ing out of Africa. It’s Africans devel­op­ing for African needs and export­ing that prod­uct to the West. Its pro­gram­mers in Ghana, Kenya, Malawi and Uganda that are shap­ing the way the world will inter­act with loca­tion and infor­ma­tion in times of emergency.

How does this apply to those in Kodok? It’s the begin­ning of some­thing new, a bet­ter way for these peo­ple to under­stand their place in the world. A way to pierce the veil of infor­ma­tion that never makes it to their vil­lage, and a way to influ­ence the world around them in a way that wasn’t pos­si­ble before. Changes in mobile phones, map­ping and web tech­nol­ogy are begin­ning to show what hap­pens when ordi­nary Africans are empow­ered with not only infor­ma­tion, but the knowl­edge that they can do some­thing with it.

But it’s not just Africa, and it’s not just Ushahidi. In a way, we were all our own Kodok prior to the inter­net and mobile phones. We were at the mercy of the tra­di­tional media talk­ing about us, about large orga­ni­za­tions set­ting the agenda and run­ning our lives. New tools are chang­ing how infor­ma­tion flows, who dis­sem­i­nates it, how we find out more about what we’re inter­ested in, and who we trust as we gather infor­ma­tion to use in our daily lives.

Further Reading

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Comments on this article

  1. Written bytwitter.com on the 22nd of April

    “Scroll Mag­a­zine | What Africa can teach us about place by
    Erik Hers­man” hon­estly got myself sim­ply addicted on your web page!
    I real­ly­will prob­a­bly wind up being back a whole lot more regularly.

    Thank you ‚Dawna

  2. Written byblinkweb.com on the 23rd of April

    I actu­ally would like to book­mark this par­tic­u­lar arti­cle, “Scroll
    Mag­a­zine | What Africa can teach us about place
    by Erik Hers­man” on my web page. Do you care if per­haps I real­lydo?
    Many thanks ‚Paige

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