Carolina For Kibera & Ushahidi

Juliana Rotich
Dec 15, 2008

Today I met with Salim Mohammed, Ken Juma and Shahrzad Nouraini of Carolina For Kibera (CFK). CFK is considering the use of Ushahidi to map and highlight their activities in the Kibera community.

Carolina For Kibera

Amongst other laudable activities, CFK in conjunction with Jamii Ya Kibera, organizes community forums "Barazas" that encourage dialogue and understanding in various parts of Kibera. Kibera is composed of twelve villages, which are currently not mapped on google maps, but will be working with Ushahidi to add these villages into their instance of Ushahidi. One of the features that they would like added to Ushahidi is the ability to define the order in which the categories appear on the site, and inclusion of sub categories. For example, they have forums for parents (to encourage them not to perpetuate tribalism to their children), Touts in the transportation industry and youth. The other feature that CFK would like is the ability to print incident reports by category, date or location. This could be used in their campaigns. The CFK team is considering Frontline SMS for use during their community events in the near future. The mobile sync is important to CFK, because their outreach includes mobile phone messages to the community leaders they have trained, and they would also engage the public via SMS messages. It will be interesting to see how CFK uses the Ushahidi platform in their work, as it would shed light into the issues and events happening in Kibera, Kenya. We look forward to learning from CFK as they test the Ushahidi Engine at http://cfk.ushahidi.com/. Bookmark it and check back soon!