Kenya’s Kuhonga Fighting Corruption Using The Ushahidi Platform

Tefo Mohapi | HumanIPO | January 17, 2013

Kuhonga, an anti-corruption mapping platform, seeks to address the question “how can we crush corruption in Africa?” by using data and maps to track activity related to corruption.

Created by Nathan Wangusi, an environmental engineering PhD candidate at the University of Florida, it was incorporated in January 2012 as an implementation of Ushahidi.

Lewis Kirvan, Kuhonga’s Chief Operations Officer, said: “Kuhonga’s essential insight is that crisis mapping and crowd-sourcing of data can be used to tackle the slow-motion crisis of endemic corruption. Social media has proven integral to revolutions in the Middle East and social movements like the Occupy movement in the United States.”

According to a post by Kirvan on Ushahidi’s website, the platform “hopes to extend the success of social media by using Ushahidi’s crowdsourcing capabilities to tackle a different sort of social problem. Rather than facilitating a short term social need, such as organisational support for a social movement or a disaster response team, Kuhonga hopes that a simple and efficient means of reporting corruption can also lead to social change through institutional reform”...