Ushahidi announces USD 1.5m grant from Development Innovation Ventures

Ushahidi has received a USD 1.5 million grant from the U.S. Agency for International Development's (USAID) U.S. Global Development Lab to support testing for social impact, improved outcomes, and market viability, as well as building pathways to scale and sustainability. The award is funded through the Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) program, a year-round open competition that seeks innovative, breakthrough development solutions.

This DIV grant will be utilized to scale the Ushahidi platform in the on-the-ground implementation of our tools with key partners working on election strengthening platforms, anti corruption initiatives, humanitarian crisis response, and projects that tackle systemic human rights abuses. It will enable us to engage more systematically in key markets by testing and implementing our open source software as a service business model.

“Ushahidi is raising a growth round of USD 4 million to scale to 50 million people impacted and 85% financial sustainability through earned revenues by the end of 2018. We are delighted in this significant vote of confidence in Ushahidi by the U.S. Global Development Lab as our lead investor.” said Daudi Were, Ushahidi’s Executive Director.

Ushahidi is a non-profit technology company whose mission is to change the way information flows in the world. Founded in Nairobi, Kenya Ushahidi means "testimony" in Swahili. The company builds digital tools and runs programs to help people raise their voice. Since 2008, the Ushahidi Platform has grown to be the world-class open-source tool for human rights activism, crisis response, and civilian empowerment. Over the past seven years, the Ushahidi Platform has been deployed more than 100,000 times in more than 159 countries, in 45 local languages, with 7 million testimonies, reaching nearly 20 million people. The platform has become a replicable solution for people worldwide to monitor services, fight corruption, track human rights abuses and more.

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For Immediate Release

Friday 15 April 2016

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