CSR Partner: Ushahidi
When people lack a voice, who can hear them?
Ushahidi was founded in Nairobi in 2008 in response to post-election violence in Kenya. It provides an open-source platform to help people raise their voice—and provides organizations the information needed to respond better to crises, political unrest, and human rights abuses around the world. Today, Ushahidi offers advanced tools that enable organizations to better coordinate their efforts and increase their impact.
Giving people a voice in times of crisis
When a crisis occurs, the people who are affected can use Ushahidi's open-source platform to report what is happening around them via social media, email, and text.
Working together to help others work together
Cisco’s partnership with Ushahidi has focused on building out the organization’s platform to give more people a voice in response to disaster, human rights abuses, and election monitoring:
- Initial partnership helped expand the utility and accessibility of the platform
- Supported upgrade to create the cloud-hosted version of the new Ushahidi V3 platform so that anyone, even non-developers, can easily access the tools
Most recently, Cisco has aided in the development of Ushahidi Responder and TenFour.
Usahidi Responder provides additional support to first responder organizations. Emergency response NGOs and government responders who respond to crises need ways to figure out what is happening on the ground; they don’t know where the greatest need is, or how to prioritize requests to make their efforts most effective.
Ushahidi Responder provides the tools for organizations to gather information, triage, and respond to needs on the ground in the most effective and efficient way.
TenFour is an open-source check-in app that helps organizations like NGOs and schools reach their employees or students on any device, to confirm that they are okay and get in touch. It speeds up response time by aggregating communication channels to provide quick reports back to an organization about the wellbeing of its people, particularly in times of crisis.
Helping those in need through technology
Cisco first partnered with Ushahidi in 2009 and continues to support development of the platform for disaster relief and first responders. Since Cisco’s early support, the Ushahidi platform has:
- Impacted more than 20 million people
- Been deployed over a 100,000 times
- Changed lives in 160 countries
“With Cisco's support we have been able to improve the functionality of our core platform for crisis response. We have been building mobile apps, improving task management, and scaling to over 130,000 uses in over 160 countries, resulting in a gathering of over 30 million reports.”
Nathaniel Manning, CEO, Ushahidi
Meet our community partners
Cisco and the Cisco Foundation partner with innovative nonprofits to deliver transformative, tech-driven solutions for economic empowerment, education, and crisis response, which includes shelter, water, food, and disaster relief.