Kate Cumings is a second-year graduate student at The Fletcher School who recently returned from Liberia where she carried out a preliminary assessment for Ushahidi deployments.
On the ride in from the airport, only the palm trees closest to the road are visible in the headlights, and the occasional flash of a person walking the small gravel shoulder. I realize that upon entering any other major airport, the long drive to the city is predictably lined with corporate headquarters and humming factories. But here in Liberia, the hour-long drive to the capital is without streetlights; the blackness surrounding the car is only sporadically broken by dim, lone bulbs over dirt thresholds.
[caption id="attachment_1766" align="alignnone" width="499" caption="Monrovia's gutted skyline"]
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“This road to town, it used to take three hours to drive.” Amos is going fast along the smooth pavement. “So many parts had been bombed, destroyed - the road was full of holes.” Once in a while the headlight beam catches the frame of an abandoned home, its decaying white walls covered in vines. Liberia's civil war ended nearly seven years ago but, even within the confines of a modern vehicle on new pavement, the widespread roots of that chronic conflict feel like a ghost not yet gone.
I came to Liberia to meet with local actors and international organizations about establishing a conflict early warning network. My colleague Erik Hersman laid the groundwork for this network in early 2009 with a technical assessment, imagining Ushahidi in the Liberian context. This network would connect actors across sectors, creating an interconnected ecosystem of warning and response to crisis events. The players? Members of the public sector, the UN, and civil society; segments of each are clustered around information collection, monitoring and alerts, while others are prepared to respond to those incidents, whether they are occuring at the neighborhood or national level. Ushahidi's immediate objective is to develop and strengthen linkages within this ecosystem using crowdsourcing technology. Each organization, UN department or government office will be offered training by myself and my tech assistant so together we can create maps with customized indicators and coverage specific to the partner's interests and preexisting mission.
In a country overflowing with a variety of NGOs and emerging peacebuilding operations at the government level, there seem to be ample opportunities for collaboration. Ushahidi and Humanity United (our donor for this deployment) see the 2011 presidential elections as a significant milestone in the progress of this ecosystem - both a goal and an indicator of how the Ushahidi platform enables citizen journalists to provide comprehensive snapshots of the electoral process as it is being lived by everyday Liberians and the organizations that represent them. The 2011 elections (scheduled for October) are anticipated to be violent, and the months leading up to them tumultuous; in preparation, Ushahidi is planting the seeds of crowdsourcing technology, providing ample time for the roots to spread and interlock one blooming effort to another.
I was in Liberia for 10 days, meeting with potential partners and getting a sense of their current projects and challenges, proposing ways in which Ushahidi's free, innovative platform may enhance their work. In June I will return to Monrovia for six months to grow the ecosystem with our partners, traveling within and outside the capital to ensure that we are reaching those previously underrepresented and often overlooked voices. It is apparent from Erik's assessment and my first days in the country that Ushahidi has an exciting opportunity in Liberia, and slowly, I am grasping the depth of our challenges. The following days will only grow the picture, the map of open avenues and still ravaged lines of communication within a country where so much (of everything) is possible.
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“This road to town, it used to take three hours to drive.” Amos is going fast along the smooth pavement. “So many parts had been bombed, destroyed - the road was full of holes.” Once in a while the headlight beam catches the frame of an abandoned home, its decaying white walls covered in vines. Liberia's civil war ended nearly seven years ago but, even within the confines of a modern vehicle on new pavement, the widespread roots of that chronic conflict feel like a ghost not yet gone.
I came to Liberia to meet with local actors and international organizations about establishing a conflict early warning network. My colleague Erik Hersman laid the groundwork for this network in early 2009 with a technical assessment, imagining Ushahidi in the Liberian context. This network would connect actors across sectors, creating an interconnected ecosystem of warning and response to crisis events. The players? Members of the public sector, the UN, and civil society; segments of each are clustered around information collection, monitoring and alerts, while others are prepared to respond to those incidents, whether they are occuring at the neighborhood or national level. Ushahidi's immediate objective is to develop and strengthen linkages within this ecosystem using crowdsourcing technology. Each organization, UN department or government office will be offered training by myself and my tech assistant so together we can create maps with customized indicators and coverage specific to the partner's interests and preexisting mission.
In a country overflowing with a variety of NGOs and emerging peacebuilding operations at the government level, there seem to be ample opportunities for collaboration. Ushahidi and Humanity United (our donor for this deployment) see the 2011 presidential elections as a significant milestone in the progress of this ecosystem - both a goal and an indicator of how the Ushahidi platform enables citizen journalists to provide comprehensive snapshots of the electoral process as it is being lived by everyday Liberians and the organizations that represent them. The 2011 elections (scheduled for October) are anticipated to be violent, and the months leading up to them tumultuous; in preparation, Ushahidi is planting the seeds of crowdsourcing technology, providing ample time for the roots to spread and interlock one blooming effort to another.
I was in Liberia for 10 days, meeting with potential partners and getting a sense of their current projects and challenges, proposing ways in which Ushahidi's free, innovative platform may enhance their work. In June I will return to Monrovia for six months to grow the ecosystem with our partners, traveling within and outside the capital to ensure that we are reaching those previously underrepresented and often overlooked voices. It is apparent from Erik's assessment and my first days in the country that Ushahidi has an exciting opportunity in Liberia, and slowly, I am grasping the depth of our challenges. The following days will only grow the picture, the map of open avenues and still ravaged lines of communication within a country where so much (of everything) is possible.