enterprise54.com - In 2014, one of the most prestigious global magazines, Fortune, named a young Kenyan woman Juliana Rotich, as one the “50 Greatest Leaders in the World”. This was an amazing accolade for anyone, particularly someone who was still only 37 years old. It was also a major paradigm shift.

When Kenya’s 2007 elections exploded into violence, many people were killed. This once peaceful country seemed to be spiralling into chaos. It seemed to many that this was a problem that could only be solved by the African Union, the UN, and the global powers. Somewhere in Kenya ordinary people also wanted to help. This included a small group of young Kenyans, some of them not even 30 years old… No problem is ever too big that an ordinary person cannot try to help. You can always do something, if you “really, really” want to help!

Juliana and her friends used their skills in Social Media platforms to create something called Ushahidi which means “Witness” Or “Testimony” in Swahili. They created a brand new way of mobilizing social activism using an app that could map both incidents of violence and peace efforts. How did it work? Ordinary citizens send info using the web or their mobile phones. It was the Kenyan people working together to end the violence. What they did then has now become known as crowdsourcing and crowdfunding – citizens in creating and funding their own solutions!

No one is saying they alone ended the violence in Kenya, but they made a huge and profound contribution. The open-source platform they created has been adopted all over the world, in places as far a field as Mexico, Haiti, India, and Gaza. Ushahidi has been recognized by leading experts as a totally ingenious invention of the social media era… and it came out of Africa!