Juliana Rotich, Ushahidi co-founder and managing director, has been honoured with with an Impact Award at the DLDwomen 2013 conference in Munich.
The award has been initiated to recognise women whose outstanding commitment makes changes in society happen.
Ushahidi, which was set up in the aftermath of the 2007 Kenyan general election, is an open-source platform which allows users to crowdsource crisis information and get it sent to their mobile.
“We are proud to give this award to strong women who, through the use of digital technologies, enhance, enrich and save lives, demonstrating courage and commitment,” said Steffi Czerny, founder of DLDwomen.
The award was presented by Gabriele Zedlmayer, vice president of global social innovation at Hewlett-Packard.
Zedlmayer said: “Juliana Rotich is an exceptional person – an engineer, a creative innovator and an optimist, which is able to effectively transfer their insights into reality. “
Ushahidi allows people to report an incident of violence or a disaster with a text message or email and request immediate assistance or medical supplies.
If possible, the messages are immediately verified and reported on the site map, with a detailed time and location.
International relief organisations are using this platform and has already been applied in countries such as Haiti, Chile and Palestine.
