The Ushahidi Story: Seeing is an intervention nobody used
On the twenty seventh of December, two thousand and seven, Kenya went to the polls.
Three days later a winner was declared. The result was disputed within the hour.
What followed killed more than twelve hundred people and drove hundreds of thousands out of their homes.
Coverage of it was patchy. In parts of the country it was actively restricted.
A country was in the middle of the worst weeks of its independent life, and nobody could say how bad, or where.
On the third of January, two thousand and eight, a Kenyan lawyer who kept a blog asked a question in public. Could any techies out there put the violence on a map.
Four people answered. One of them wrote the code from Birmingham, Alabama.
Six days later the site was live. It was called Ushahidi. In Swahili, that word means testimony.
The organisation that grew out of that week is, in law, an American non profit corporation.
It is registered in the state of Florida. It has been tax exempt since March two thousand and nine. Its filing address is in Orlando.
Nothing about that was hidden. It was filed.
THREE DAYS
Kenya’s December two thousand and seven election put the sitting president, Mwai Kibaki, against the opposition leader, Raila Odinga.
Kibaki was declared the winner on the thirtieth of December. Odinga’s camp said the count had been rigged.
Within days the country came apart along ethnic and political lines. More than twelve hundred people were killed. Hundreds of thousands were pushed off their land.
It happened in towns, in slums, on farms, in places a long way from any bureau or any camera.
Neighbours who had shared a street for twenty years stopped sharing it. Whole trading towns emptied in a night, and the people who left them walked to church compounds and school fields and stayed there for months.
Mainstream coverage was patchy, and in parts of the country it was actively restricted. What the nation was doing to itself was not being counted while it happened.
That is not a small failure. In a crisis, the count is the thing everybody negotiates over afterwards — who did what, where, and how much of it. If nobody is keeping the count while it happens, it gets written later, by whoever is still standing.
On the third of January, two thousand and eight, a Kenyan lawyer and blogger named Ory Okolloh published a post.
The blog was called Kenyan Pundit. She asked whether any techies out there would be willing to do a mashup of where the violence and the destruction were occurring, using Google Maps.
Erik Hersman, a blogger with a large technology readership, amplified the call.
Juliana Rotich, a Kenyan technologist, came in.
And David Kobia, a Kenyan born developer then living in Birmingham, Alabama, sat down and did the core technical build in roughly two days.
Say that flatly, because it is not decoration. The software that counted Kenya’s dead was written in the American south. It is the first instance of a pattern that never leaves this story.
There was no company here, no budget and no plan. There was a blog post, a handful of replies, and four people in three countries agreeing over email about what the thing should do.
On January ninth, two thousand and eight, the site went live. Six days had passed since the question.
A person who had seen something could send a text message, or fill in a web form.
The report was categorised. Somebody checked what could be checked.
And then it appeared, as a point, on a public map that anyone could open.
The name was the argument. Ushahidi means testimony. The claim inside the word is that an ordinary person saying what they saw is evidence, and that evidence counts.
A Harvard Kennedy School analysis later compared what the map had gathered against what Kenya’s mainstream media reported over the same period.
The crowdsourced reporting captured more incidents. It also captured more rural incidents.
A tool built in three days by four people, one of them on another continent, counted a country’s crisis better than that country’s press did.
The rural half of that finding is the sharper half. The places least likely to have a reporter in them are the places most likely to be where something happens, and a text message costs the same from anywhere.
A LEGAL HOME
Through two thousand and eight the crisis wound down into a mediated political settlement. The emergency ended.
The tool did not. And that was the problem, because the tool had been built to be thrown away.
It had been scoped for one country, over a matter of weeks. Turning a crisis hack into software that could be picked up and run by strangers in a different emergency was a second engineering project, and a harder one. It would take years.
And the thing that would have to do it was not an organisation. It was a group of volunteers and a mailing list.
A group of volunteers cannot hold money. It cannot sign a grant agreement, or employ anybody, or own the thing it just built.
There was also nothing to sell. The platform was free and open source. Anybody could download it and run their own.
That was not an oversight. It was the point. A crisis mapping tool that a human rights group in a poor country has to buy is a crisis mapping tool that group will not have on the day it needs it.
But the consequence is arithmetic. No customers. Which means no revenue. Which means the money had to come from somewhere that gives money away.
In two thousand and nine, that meant foundations. And the foundations that fund civic technology are overwhelmingly American.
Foundations do not give money to mailing lists. They give it to legal entities their own lawyers recognise, which meant a tax exempt corporation of a kind the United States tax code defines.
So in March two thousand and nine, Ushahidi Inc. received a United States five oh one c three tax exemption ruling.
It was incorporated in Florida. Its registered address is in Orlando.
Not a campus. A filing address, of the kind thousands of organisations share.
The staff were in Nairobi. The community was in Nairobi. The public identity was in Nairobi, where the organisation also kept a post box.
Two places. One organisation. One of them is where the work happened and one of them is where the paperwork lives.
That split is not unusual. It is close to standard for a non profit that raises internationally and operates somewhere else, and the people who chose it chose it for the reason anybody chooses it — because the money would not come otherwise.
That same year, Omidyar Network committed one point four million dollars over two and a half years.
That is what the legal shell bought. The organisation could now hire people, hold money, sign for things, and keep the platform alive between crises instead of only during one.
Ory Okolloh served as the first Executive Director, from the beginning until December two thousand and ten.
So: the authorship is Kenyan. The incorporation is American. Neither of those facts follows from the other.
And none of it was concealed. The incorporation sits on the organisation’s own governance page. It is an ordinary structure for an internationally funded non profit, and arguably a practical one.
This is not a finding about anybody’s integrity. It is a finding about where the legal home and the money of African technology actually sit. A listener who assumed that building it in Nairobi meant owning it in Nairobi was assuming. Nobody misled them.
OTHER PEOPLE’S EMERGENCIES
In two thousand and ten the organisation launched Crowdmap — a hosted version of the platform that needed no installation at all.
Anyone with a browser and a reason could start a map in an afternoon.
The tool travelled because the need travelled. A crisis that nobody is counting is not a Kenyan condition. It recurs everywhere.
In January two thousand and ten an earthquake destroyed much of Port au Prince.
Reports came from people under rubble, from relatives abroad relaying phone calls, from volunteers translating Creole overnight.
Nearly forty thousand crowdsourced reports were gathered on the Haiti deployment.
Then Chile, a month later.
The Gulf of Mexico oil spill, that May.
The Russian wildfires that summer.
Christchurch. Then the Arab Spring. Then Nepal, in twenty fifteen.
The list is long enough that the list stops being the point.
Then the tool came home. The Kenyan deployment had a Kenyan name: Uchaguzi.
It was piloted at Kenya’s constitutional referendum in August two thousand and ten.
For the general election of twenty thirteen it was scaled up — between a hundred and fifty and two hundred and fifty volunteers, working shifts, gathering more than eight thousand reports.
It ran again in twenty seventeen.
Kenyans monitoring a Kenyan election, with the tool that had been built for Kenya’s last one. The thing made in an emergency had become something the country could pick up on purpose.
The money matured alongside it. In twenty thirteen came the MacArthur Award for Creative and Effective Institutions — seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, earmarked partly to build a financial reserve.
In April twenty sixteen, one and a half million dollars from USAID’s Development Innovation Ventures.
A United States government aid agency, funding the flagship story of African technology.
In twenty ten Hersman and Rotich also co founded iHub in Nairobi, the space credited with catalysing the label Silicon Savannah.
The same four people who built the tool also built the room, and the room gave the sector the name it still uses.
The tool never solved the problem at its own centre.
A report of violence is least verifiable at exactly the moment it matters most. The person sending it is running. Nobody can call them back.
Ushahidi’s process was ad hoc — cross check a report against other reports, and against whatever media was available.
From Haiti onward, researchers and journalists documented what one analysis called a suspicion of the crowd: worry about manipulation, about who was represented, about accuracy.
The critique came largely from Western and academic observers, holding crowdsourced data to institutional standards the communities being served had not asked for and did not necessarily need. That pattern in who was raising it is part of the record too.
It was never resolved. It is not a scandal and it does not have a date. It is a tension that runs the whole length of the story.
By twenty seventeen, the organisation reported more than one hundred and twenty five thousand deployments of the platform, across more than a hundred and sixty countries.
That figure is the organisation’s own count. It is not audited anywhere. It is a claim about scale.
No source examines even a small sample of those deployments for outcome, for effectiveness, or for harm. It tells you how far the software went. It does not tell you what happened when it got there.
The platform is called testimony. It exists to carry the testimony of people in crisis. Kenyans texting about violence in two thousand and eight. Haitians reporting from under rubble in twenty ten. Election observers in a dozen countries since.
Across every source gathered for this episode, not one of those reporters is named, interviewed, or followed up with. Forty thousand people in Haiti are a single number.
The tool kept every one of those reports, and nobody kept their names.
THE COMPLAINT
On the nineteenth of January, twenty seventeen, at a company retreat, the Executive Director of Ushahidi, Daudi Were, made lewd comments toward a member of staff.
Her name is Angela Kabari. She worked on Ushahidi’s Making All Voices Count team. He also pressured her regarding a colleague.
She did not go public. She went through the process.
The man she was complaining about ran the organisation. He reported to the board, and the board was the only body above him.
On the fourth of May, twenty seventeen, she filed a formal complaint with the board.
The board acted on it. It engaged outside legal counsel specialising in human resources and sexual harassment. Were was placed on leave.
And then, for eleven weeks, nothing was public.
Eleven weeks is a long time inside an organisation of roughly thirty people. Everybody knew something. Nobody outside knew anything.
She was still working there. So were the colleagues who had watched her file it. An investigation that nobody will describe is, from the inside, indistinguishable from an investigation that is going nowhere.
On the twentieth of July, twenty seventeen, Angela Kabari published her own account of what had happened, publicly, under her own name.
She described the incident. She described the months since. She put her name on it in a sector small enough that everybody in it would read it and know exactly who she was.
And she criticised the board’s process directly, calling it slow and opaque, and alleging that some senior colleagues had sought to protect him.
In the days that followed, more than a dozen additional women came forward with accounts of harassment by Were. Some described conduct going back roughly a decade.
It stopped being an internal matter. It was covered internationally and it was covered at home — by CNN, by Quartz Africa, by the Kenyan business press.
They covered it as one of the first major public reckonings with sexual harassment inside the tech scene those same founders had helped build and name. Silicon Savannah had a story about itself, and this was it.
The board did not resign. The investigation it had commissioned in May was still running, and it finished it.
On July twenty second, two thousand and seventeen, the board dismissed Daudi Were with immediate effect.
She published on the twentieth. More than a dozen women followed her within days. He was gone on the twenty second.
An organisation whose entire founding proposition was that making something visible is an intervention had that proposition demonstrated against it, from the inside, by one of its own employees.
AN ORDINARY HANDOVER
The more than a dozen women who came forward after the twentieth of July have, in the record available, no names and no individual accounts. Only Kabari’s.
An organisation built to amplify voices has amplified almost none of its own people’s. That is the record as it exists, and nobody has been invented here to fill it.
Were was not criminally charged. The organisation wrote to its funders and its partners, setting out what had happened.
Later in twenty seventeen, Nathaniel Manning was appointed Chief Executive.
And then, for four years, very little happened. That sentence is the evidence, so it is worth slowing down on. The organisation did not fold. It did not lose its funding. It did not stop shipping.
In October twenty eighteen, version four of the Ushahidi Platform shipped.
In twenty nineteen Manning stepped down, spinning out a newer product called Dispatcher as a separate venture, and taking it with him.
Angela Oduor Lungati was promoted to Executive Director after a handover that ran for months.
She had studied business information technology at Strathmore University in Nairobi.
She had volunteered on the Uchaguzi referendum monitoring in twenty ten, before she worked there at all.
She joined as a software development intern in twenty eleven.
She became Director of Community Engagement. Then, eight years in, she took over the whole thing.
Not a rescue. Not a battlefield promotion. An insider, handed a global platform over several months, in an orderly way.
An organisation that had lost its leader in a public scandal two years earlier replaced his replacement without drama, from within, on a schedule. That is what a governance crisis looks like when it has actually been resolved rather than survived.
In January twenty twenty one, Crowdmap dot com shut down permanently, ending support for the legacy product line that had taken the platform to the world in twenty ten.
The old thing was switched off. The core platform carried on.
And twenty twenty one was, on the organisation’s own filings, the biggest year it has ever reported. Revenue of roughly five and a half million dollars.
Net assets of roughly four and a half million dollars.
NOBODY LOOKED
In twenty twenty four, Angela Oduor Lungati was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and a Mozilla Rise twenty five Honoree.
Two of the more visible recognitions in global technology, landing on the head of this organisation, sixteen years after the map went up.
Across twenty twenty three and twenty twenty four the board completed a renewal. A new chair came in, and new members with her.
The recruitment for those open seats drew more than ninety applicants.
The platform is still running. The organisation is still able to attract funders, institutions and attention. That is the first picture, and it is a picture of an institution in good standing.
The second picture comes out of the same public record, from a different shelf of it.
Ushahidi Inc. files a Form nine ninety every year, as any American tax exempt organisation must. An outside non profit explorer aggregates those returns and publishes what it reads in them.
In that aggregation, revenue falls from roughly five and a half million dollars in twenty twenty one to somewhere between roughly three hundred and thirty nine thousand and eight hundred and fifty one thousand dollars a year.
There are net losses in every year from twenty twenty two through twenty twenty four.
And net assets fall from roughly four and a half million dollars to about eight hundred and thirty eight thousand dollars.
Those figures come from an aggregation of Form nine ninety data, not from the returns themselves, and this episode has not opened the primary filings. That is this episode’s own working, and it is being shown rather than hidden.
A swing of that size can be a grant covering several years, recognised in a single one. That is ordinary non profit accounting, and it would mean far less than it looks like.
It can also be exactly what it looks like. This episode does not know which, and it is not going to pretend otherwise.
Whatever those numbers mean, there is no press coverage of them anywhere the research for this episode looked.
Not in African technology press. Not in non profit philanthropy press. Not in civic technology press.
No funder statement. No organisational communication. A multi year movement in a public filing, and the public did not move.
Omidyar Network, the Knight Foundation, MacArthur, Mozilla and USAID are named as funders across sixteen years.
Not one of them has ever given its own account of the relationship. Why they funded it, what they expected, whether they were satisfied, whether any of them stepped back.
The whole relationship is documented from one side — grant announcements and thank you posts.
There is a prior question nobody has asked either. Over sixteen years, did the category itself change — did social media, messaging apps and systems built by governments reduce the need for a dedicated crisis mapping platform?
No source found examines it. That is named here as unexamined, and it is not offered as the explanation for anything. Nobody has established it, so nobody gets to use it.
And for twenty twenty five and twenty twenty six, nothing at all was found.
An organisation whose founding argument was that somebody should be counting has a present that nobody has counted.
That is not a gap in this episode. It is what the episode found.
Four people, six days, and a map of text messages that counted a country better than that country’s own press did. That part is settled. It happened, and it was measured.
The rest is not. The filings sit in Orlando, the work sits in Nairobi, the people who sent the reports have no names in the record, and the last four years of a sixteen year story are a set of numbers nobody has read.
Ushahidi spent sixteen years arguing that a thing unseen is a thing that does not count. It is still waiting for somebody to turn that argument around and point it back. This is Asili Africa. Every empire has an origin. See you on the next one.
Key Takeaways
- THREE DAYS. Kenya’s December two thousand and seven election put the sitting president, Mwai Kibaki, against the opposition leader, Raila Odinga.
- OTHER PEOPLE’S EMERGENCIES. In two thousand and ten the organisation launched Crowdmap — a hosted version of the platform that needed no installation at all.
- THE COMPLAINT. On the nineteenth of January, twenty seventeen, at a company retreat, the Executive Director of Ushahidi, Daudi Were, made lewd comments toward a member of staff.
- NOBODY LOOKED. In twenty twenty four, Angela Oduor Lungati was named a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader, and a Mozilla Rise twenty five Honoree.
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