Dear Friends,
Today Ushahidi is launching our first grassroots fundraising campaign to aptly support our grassroots users. We’re reaching out to ask for your help - would you consider donating to Ushahidi?
Ushahidi is embarking on this fundraising campaign to enable us to continue to support hundreds of grassroots organizations using our cutting-edge open source technology to make their work 10x more effective. You can read all about our work together here on our grassroots page, where we feature some of the most impactful uses of Ushahidi. These grassroots organizations are helping respond to crises, monitor elections, document human rights abuses, empower citizens, care for the health of those in their communities, protect against gender violence, reduce violence, and speak truth to power.
For example, SafeCity, in India, use Ushahidi to help women around the world report on gender violence and advocate for their safety. Elsa, the founder of SafeCity, said of their use of Ushahidi: “It is absolutely critical that a central team at Ushahidi can support small organisations as it is not possible for each organisation to have their own tech teams. It also allows us to depend on Ushahidi whilst concentrating on our mission without having the burden of worrying about the tech.”
Rexy, who co-created Penang Hill Clearing, used Ushahidi to monitor illegal logging of rainforest in Malaysia said: “Information power plus people power through Ushahidi is not just additive but exponential!”
Every year Ushahidi gives over US $10,000/each of value in technology and support to each of these orgs, for free. We need your help to continue providing these essential tools and support to election monitors, human rights defenders, crisis responders, grassroots activists and individuals working to have their communities voices heard.
At Ushahidi we believe that it is essential that there are organizations out there who make technology specifically to solve these humanitarian and development problems. These organizations doing incredible work to solve huge humanitarian, development, and civic problems need software that is designed by, with, and for them. Tools designed for the private sector are powerful, but can only be stretched so far. That is why we believe it is essential to build technology that is designed specifically to solve problems such as trust in elections (Ushahidi helped increase voter turnout by 8% in the Nigerian election by increasing trust), matching resources with needs in response to a crisis such as Quakemap or the LA Homelessness Map, or bring transparency to human rights abuses such as Iran Protests, SyriaTracker, or DocumentHate USA.
For more on Ushahidi, you can read our 10 year impact report here, check out our blog here, or visit our donate page where we feature powerful examples of grassroot organisations using Ushahidi.
It’s our hope that through these donations, we will continue to create, innovate, host, support, and make open source these tools to help disadvantaged people raise their voice and get the help they need.
With gratitude,
The Ushahidi team