Yes, we still need technology to combat the effects of the COVID-19 Pandemic

It’s been well over a year since the World Health Organisation declared COVID-19 a global pandemic after its detection in Wuhan. Several problems became apparent at that time:-

• There were substantial informational gaps. Scientists and health officials were making slow progress in understanding the effects of COVID-19 but were yet to give conclusive answers on who was most at risk and how to treat those affected. It was challenging to keep track of infection hotspots, both for citizens and governments. Citizens and health officials struggled to get access to PPEs. And, of course, in a vacuum of credible information, misinformation thrives.
• While lockdowns may have been effective in slowing down the spread of the disease, they had far-reaching social and economic effects on citizens. People have lost their livelihoods. Vulnerable and high-risk communities have been unable to get access to information and critical resources.
• Most of all, most governments worldwide had limited capacity to respond to a crisis at this scale. Healthcare systems were unable to respond to increased demand for testing services, and there were limited resources to handle critical cases in ICUs. This still stands true for many governments, especially in developing countries.

Local communities sprung into action, seeking open technology platforms to collect data, relying on collective intelligence to provide insights into the pervasiveness of COVID-19. They were able to create visibility into where to access critical resources and services, fill informational gaps for official response, and hold governments accountable for any shortcomings in responding to the pandemic.

Overall, communities have deployed Ushahidi’s open-source platform over 1,684 times in the last 13 months, across 130 countries. Some notable examples include-

• Frena La Curva: This project aimed to help people cope with the COVID crisis and lockdown in Spain by providing valuable online resources and mapping resources and public services around citizens. They spurred a movement in the Hispanic community in Europe and Latin America that saw the emergence of 23 different maps based on their model.
• COVID-19 Livestock Experts for Farmers — collecting information on the impact of COVID on the farming industry in Kenya
• Kenya COVID-19 Tracker — Map Kibera has been using Ushahidi to document the crisis itself and create a geospatial information resource about what is happening where in Kenya for anyone to use. It has been a valuable tool for the Kenyan government in allocating resources for its responses, such as the best locations to install handwashing stations. They have also trained health workers on how to create and use data in the tracker.
• Observatoire CoronAmazon: This project is surveying local initiatives and documenting the socio-environmental impact of COVID-19 on the Brazilian Amazon.
• HOT — PDC — USAID Handwashing Station Map — The HOT OSM community in Indonesia has mapped over 1,100 handwashing stations across the country. They make this data available on the Humanitarian Data Exchange platform.
• BLACKLIST Employer Arbitrariness: This project documents cases of employer arbitrariness during the pandemic.

Observatoire CoronAmazon

BLACKLIST Employer Arbitrariness

What we’ve learned

Three key lessons emerge from our quest to support social change and fight for social justice over the last 12 years and the last year of supporting groups working on COVID-19 response.

1. Technology is useless if it’s not accessible or if people don’t know how to use it.
2. Technology needs to adapt to the emerging needs of our users.
3. Technology is but an enabler in the quest for social change.

These insights have validated and informed our decision to

1. Waive the fees of on hosted service and continue to provide our open-source platform at no cost to communities that need it. The high demand for Ushahidi’s platform has been a strong validation of collective intelligence’s power in the last year. It also strengthened our resolve to ensure that we are playing our part in ensuring people have access to technology to solve problems in their communities.
2. Integrate new low-cost options for data collection on the Ushahidi platform. We recently launched an integration that enables reporting via USSD and have begun exploring integration with WhatsApp, Signal and Telegram. With the far-reaching economic effects of this pandemic, it’s even more critical to be able to reach those who are in most need of help, with tools they have access to, cheaply.
3. Improve our support resources and develop toolkits to help our users think about their offline and online engagement strategies and partnerships to set in place for response. For there to be meaningful change, people have to be able to leverage technology for success, and we recognise that provision of the tool itself is not enough to push the needle.

Looking to the future and how COVIDAction is helping us get there.

We’ve seen a shift in deployment focus, moving away from crisis response and highlighting inequalities and injustices exacerbated by the pandemic, including, i.e. human rights protection, social accountability and good governance. There are still far-reaching effects of lockdowns being felt by ordinary citizens, more so with the third wave and new COVID-19 variants emerging in different parts of the world.

We believe that Ushahidi’s work will be even more critical moving forward because coming out of this crisis will require collective action and responsibility. We need to continue to provide adequate avenues for inclusion and engagement of the general public in response efforts.

Supporting groups working on vaccine rollout and equity

Progress is undoubtedly being made in the fight against COVID-19, with vaccines’ development and its rollout worldwide. As of 11th April 2021, 788 million vaccine doses have been administered worldwide. However, there is a considerable disparity in administration between different countries and continents. Africa is reported to have the lowest vaccination rate of any continent, and several countries are yet to start mass vaccination of their citizens.

Ushahidi has been in conversation with several stakeholders working in the vaccine roll out space, especially in developing countries, and some key issues have emerged:-

• Misinformation/distrust and apathy: There is a general sense of distrust of the vaccines, attributed to their rapid development, experiment with new technologies and unsubstantiated reports of hidden agendas in their rollout. These have been exacerbated by the widespread news of vaccines causing complications such as blood clotting. Even among populations eligible for the vaccines, there is apathy towards the vaccines with low uptake. Some have chosen to adopt a wait-and-see approach, while others haven’t prioritised receiving a jab.
• Lengthy/Unclear Procedures and bureaucracy: Organisations reported that the procedure for obtaining a vaccine was complicated or not apparent to those interested in receiving it in some places. This might involve using manual processes in collecting details of people on paper, sending those to a central office and a waiting period before the vaccine is availed at the site to be administered. Those interested would have to make multiple visits, risking exposure, and for some of the most vulnerable, the effort required discourages them from proceeding.
• Lack of information on availability and eligibility: Another issue cited was that people didn’t know where they can go to get vaccinated, and certain groups being prioritised over others when they are eligible for it.

Thanks to the FCDO UK and COVID Action team’s support and funding, Ushahidi is in continued conversation with other stakeholders in the vaccine rollout space and has enabled us to articulate our value proposition in solving some of the problems highlighted above. We think that Ushahidi is ideally placed to help to:-

• Counter false narratives around vaccines by crowdsourcing positive experiences of those who have received vaccines.
• Ease the coordination of vaccine distribution through digitisation and direct engagement with potential beneficiaries.
• Create visibility on the eligibility of vaccination and also map out locations that vaccines are being administered.

Sustaining the provision of our tools for free

We recently decided to extend our free hosting until the end of 2021. However, we still need to explore avenues that allow us to continue providing these tools at no cost in the long run. The key to that lies in a solid and sustainable business model.

We’ve kicked off this process by first helping the world understand Ushahidi’s value and impact. FCDO UK and the COVIDAction team’s support has gone a long way in helping us:-

• Understand our tools’ impact in the fight against covid and document user stories to highlight data collection platforms’ role in COVID mitigation actions. Here is one by Harry Machmud, who uses Ushahidi in Indonesia to map out handwashing stations.
• Expand our brand communications to reflect our value addition in light of our work on COVID-19. This is one of many steps in helping us build a sustainable business model that would allow us to continue to provide Ushahidi tools at no cost to those that need them. We will be launching this within the next few weeks.

We would like to thank the groups such as COVIDAction/FCDO that are actively working to support initiatives aimed at mitigating the effects of the pandemic that continues to disrupt our normal way of living. While a lot has been done so far, a lot more remains to be done to support the most vulnerable communities. Technology has proven to be a critical contributor and with further support, it can continue to be used at scale to create visibility into where to access critical resources and services, fill informational gaps for official response, and hold governments accountable in this phase of the global vaccine rollout.

About the FCDO COVIDaction Data Challenge

The Data Challenge is part of the COVIDaction programme, funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO) across key thematic areas of oxygen, data, resilient health, and local production. The programme is a partnership between the UK FCDO’s Frontier Technology Hub, Global Disability Innovation Hub (GDI Hub), UCL Institute of Healthcare Engineering, along with other collaborators.