The Next Five Years
Charting our course for growth
Now, thanks to the generosity of our grant funders and a months-long process, we’ve established a five-year strategic plan to reaffirm our mission, improve our Platform and empower more people to raise their voices and influence change.
Our Goal
Raise 20 million voices globally by 2026
Charting our course for growth
Last Updated October 15th, 2024
goal of 20M33.41% towards raising 20M voices
2949Deployments
6.7M+Submissions & Reports33Published Case StudiesTo reach our goal of raising 20 million voices, we are embarking on a multi-pronged scaling approach in which we can:
- Increase the number of deployments
- Improve technology and features for both rapid-response and long-term change
- Strengthen our support services and foster community
Theory of Change
We are immensely proud of our role as a technology intermediary and enabler of action and impact. We succeed when our deployment partners succeed, and only through them do we raise voices and change communities. The impacts and outcomes of this work is illustrated through the Ushahidi Theory of Change.
Ushahidi
We provide technology and expertise to mission-aligned organizations and communities.
Partners
Partners use the Ushahidi Platform to collect data to raise citizen voices.
Systems Level Change
As voices are amplified, organizational effectiveness grows and social impact is strengthened.
Join us as we explore the Strategic Priorities underpinning our plan and the steps we’re taking to reach our ultimate goal.
Focus & GrowStrengthen & InnovateBuild CommunitySTRATEGIC PRIORITY 1
Focus & Grow
Since our inception, Ushahidi has been deployed in a multitude of contexts. Over the next five years, we are focusing primarily on the three impact areas where our past deployments have been strongest, where we have the most credibility and expertise and where we can continue to drive impact in the future.
Good Governance
Holding governments accountable to strong governance practices, including fair and free elections.
EXAMPLE DEPLOYMENT
Reclaim Naija
Crowdsourced reports provided info to improve polling station functionality;
8%
Increase in voter turnout in the Nigerian 2011 elections
Humanitarian & Disaster Relief
Supporting communities affected by conflict, natural disasters and humanitarian challenges.
EXAMPLE DEPLOYMENT
Frena la Curva
Matching individuals in need with volunteers during COVID-19 lockdowns in Spain
22
Countries model was replicated in
Human Rights Protection
Protecting human rights during periods of violence and discrimination.
EXAMPLE DEPLOYMENT
Iran Protests
Capturing 24,000+ reports from Iranian protests sparked by the death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the hands of the ‘morality police’.
24K
Reports submitted
While the Platform will retain the flexibility to be used in a variety of use cases, focusing on three core areas allows us to improve the platform in ways that truly benefit deployment partners and end-users.
Grow
In order to raise 20 million voices globally and grow the number of Ushahidi Platform deployments, we plan to implement strategic outreach, business development and communication efforts, as well as establish clear measurement models to help us achieve our desired impact.
Outreach & engagement efforts:
- Outreach, advertising, conference attendance, speaking engagements
- Business development
- What steps will be taken to foster greater awareness?
Measurement & Learning
Quantifying our impact is of utmost importance. In our role as a technology provider and enabler, we recognize our impact is highly contingent on the activities of our partners. Therefore, our approach focuses primarily on measuring outputs tied directly to Platform activities, rather than outcomes as a result of partner efforts.
EXAMPLE OUTPUTS
EXAMPLE OUTCOMES
- Number of deployments
- Number of people reached
- Number of submissions / reports
- Number of lives saved
- Percentage increase in voter turnout
EXAMPLE OUTCOMES
Better measurement of Outputs helps us progress toward raising 20 million voices and improves future measurement of Outcomes with deployment partners.
Because our measurement approach centers on raising voices as the primary unit of impact and that the activities of our partners contribute to improved outcomes, we are tracking our impact on three levels:
- Tracking outputs — deployments, submissions/reports, people reached, etc.
- Platform usage data and measurement, as well as collaboration with partners on shaping Platform data models and data attribution toward their efforts
- External impact evaluations with partners, demonstrating the link between outputs and outcomes (e.g. understanding how an Ushahidi election monitoring deployment impacted voter turnout)
STRATEGIC PRIORITY 2
Strengthen & Innovate
This priority reflects our commitment to strengthening the ‘core’ of Ushahidi – our Platform and how it allows our partners to collect data relevant to each of our key impact areas. To improve the platform, we’re driven by three pillars of excellence:
- Designing for end-users for relevance and impact
- Strengthening the technical quality of our Platform
- Increasing access to knowledge and expertise
Platform Improvements
- Strengthen APIs so deployments can be easily integrated with other applications and services
- Invest in efficacy of offline data collection channels (e.g., USSD and SMS)
- Expand ability to translate content on our platform to improve accessibility for deployment owners and end users
- Improve data tracking across Ushahidi’s operations
New Features
- Build excellent end-user feedback loops to enable every end-user to be reached, with multiple use cases available (e.g., verify information, follow-up for update, request repeat data input)
- Invest in text analysis capabilities to clean and transform data — especially unstructured data from emails, tweets, and SMS - to collect and analyze a high volume of data quickly
- Introduce a deployment dashboard that presents basic summary metrics and an overview of activity to help deployment owners engage with data collected.
Fostering knowledge and innovation
Advisory services & knowledge resources
Today at Ushahidi, we provide hands-on support to our enterprise partners, primarily rooted in technological guidance to power deployments. In the next five years, we will grow to offer an expanded advisory service.
Through training and ongoing support, we will advise partners on critical questions that go beyond the technology. We will shape our service to share learnings and best practices on topics such as:
- Successful advocacy approaches in a given impact area
- Tactics for inclusive data collection
- Approaches for scaling deployment reach
- Advice on what data to track to measure impact
While this advisory offering will be delivered to enterprise clients, we will also ensure that our full set of users can benefit from enhanced knowledge-sharing within our impact areas. Alongside our investments in strengthening the community, we are also creating an accessible set of knowledge assets, including case studies and improved documentation.
Strategic innovation where necessary
While the bulk of the next five years will be dedicated to strengthening our core offerings, we will in parallel continue to explore innovation opportunities and impacts, with a goal of pursuing additional areas of innovation in later stages of the strategic plan.
STRATEGIC PRIORITY 3
Build Community
Ushahidi’s community consists of a number of groups, without whom our impact would not be possible:
- End users who raise their voice by inputting data
- Deployment partners who use Ushahidi to create impact
- Contributors who use the open-source Ushahidi code
- Collaborators who support us, whether through funding or other forms of partnership
The Ushahidi Community
We plan to support our community holistically, focusing on making it easy for our deployment partners to communicate, collaborate, and learn from one another. We strive to set our partners up for success, going beyond our hands-on support systems to launch the following tools.
Community Portal
A place for deployment partners to connect with one another, share expertise, best practices and advice. For example, if two partners are managing deployments in the election monitoring space, they can share insights into data modeling and more.
Knowledge Assets
Regularly updated case studies reflecting on the impacts achieved by deployment partners and improved documentation offering detailed guidance on platform set-up, features and analysis.
Community Events
Planned and hosted webinars, conversations and collaboration sessions to strengthen connections among members of the Ushahidi community.
Conclusion
Ushahidi’s mission, the relevance of our flagship product, the explicit focus on accessible technology tools and our commitment to our open-source community remain as vital as ever. We are thrilled to be embarking on a bold new journey, one rooted in improving our Platform, our connections with our partners and raising voices around the globe.
