December 14, 2011
Juliana Rotich, the Executive Director of Ushahidi, blogs about a moment of “discovery and awe” that just happened at the Eye on Earth conference in Abu Dhabi. They got into a conversation about crowdsourcing with three participants from Afghanistan, and on the spot discovered–to everyone’s surprise–a robust deployment of Ushahidi’s Crowdmap tool being used by the Ministry of Agriculture, Irrigation and Livestock in Nangarhar Province. The site is chock-a-block with hundreds of reports of highly useful data, including such things as diesel prices–all available to mobile phone users. Stop and think of it: from a election-monitoring site launched barely four years ago, Ushahidi is helping Afghani farmers crowdsource their market conditions.