Ushahidi Bags Prestigious Recognition as a Digital Public Good from the Digital Public Goods Alliance

 

Ushahidi’s mission is to empower communities to thrive as a result of accessible data and technology. By enabling the rapid collection, management and analysis of crowdsourced information through its open source platform, Ushahidi empowers everyone—individuals, community groups, governments, activists, organisations—to create meaningful change. To learn more about our work and impact, visit our website https://www.ushahidi.com/. 

What began as an effort to bring light to the experience of individuals during the 2008 Kenyan Elections has expanded to a global scale with more than 200,000 deployments in over 160 countries. With an entire ecosystem of software and tools built to facilitate the work done by human rights advocates, journalists, election monitors and those responding to disaster and crisis.

The Digital Public Goods Alliance (DPGA) is a multi-stakeholder initiative endorsed by the United Nations Secretary-General, working to accelerate the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals in low- and middle-income countries by facilitating the discovery, development, use of, and investment in digital public goods.

Ushahidi was added to the Digital Public Goods Alliance DPG Registry. The goal of the DPGA and its registry is to promote digital public goods to create a more equitable world. Being recognised as a DPG increases the visibility, support for, and prominence of open projects that have the potential to tackle global challenges. To become a digital public good, all projects are required to meet the DPG Standard to ensure that projects truly encapsulate open source principles. 

At Ushahidi, we are thrilled to be recognised as a digital public good - defined as open source software, open data, open AI models, open standards and open content that adhere to privacy and other applicable laws and best practices, do no harm, and help attain the SDGs. This means that our open source software and integrated tools and services can enable people to generate solutions and mobilise communities for good in a safe digital space. This is backed by how our crowdsourcing tools that have been successfully used by thousands of groups and millions of people to raise voices, inform decisions, stop suffering and influence change.

At this point, we are curious to see what Ushahidi looks like in this DPG Registry, and I bet you are as well. Well, check out the shining latest entrant!

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