Renowned Kenyan crowdsourcing site, Ushahidi is set to launch a new site that will help monitor government effectiveness. The new site is called Huduma.
Huduma (which is a Swahili word for “service”) enables people to submit reports on the performance of services in their district by text, e-mail or Twitter. The reports are then mapped on the Huduma site for public viewing.
The service is a modification of the Ushahidi platform, an open source technology that crowdsources crisis information via SMS and the web and then maps the reports for viewers. Ushahidi is estimated to have been deployed about 12,000 times across the world including notably during the earthquakes in Haiti where it proved to be invaluable.
In a recent conversation about Huduma with UK newspaper, The Guardian, Erik Hersman, co-founder of Ushahidi said:
“There will be a dashboard which will compare one district with another. We will also layer in other information such as aid flows from, say, the World Bank. So, for example, if you pull up the profile of a school or clinic, you will have information about what aid it may have received as well as local reports on whether the teachers are turning up to work.”
International donors are reportedly excited about the service because it can serve as a useful tool for tracking international aid and ensuring that it is being put to good use. According to Hersman, the service will be launched in five constituencies and then spread to various parts of Kenya. The team plans to initially focus on the health and educational sector and later expand to include infrastructure, governance and water.
Huduma joins the growing number of technologies and tools dedicated towards solving African problems using African solutions.
For more information about the service, visit www.huduma.info.
To read more examples of ways in which Africans are putting tech to good use on the continent, check out this post.