Ending the Unversities for Ushahidi Program
In 2009, Patrick Meier, Ushahidi's Director of Strategic Partnerships & Crisis Mapping, announced at the Clinton Global Initiative that he would launch a global University for Ushahidi network that would bring together students from around the world to learn about participatory mapping and peacebuilding.
In 2011, Ushahidi, through a partnership with the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), made good on that promise. We created and ran the Universities for Ushahidi program, a one-week training session that brought 11 men and women from Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Egypt, Armenia, Liberia, Haiti, Nepal, Kenya, and Zimbabwe to USIP's academy classrooms in Washington, DC, for a week long, hands-on sessions about the current generation of mobile and mapping tools alongside training from USIP's excellent academy staff about the meaning and context of peacebuilding. It was an amazing experience to work with this excellent group of individuals and we're excited to see what each of them continue to bring to this field and their own communities.
Today, we're excited to announce a dedicated partnership with TechChange, who were also engaged in teaching U4U. Together with TechChange, we've drawn on the lessons learned from U4U to create a new, online course on Ushahidi, a combination of learning the administration of the platform itself along with interviews and conversations with our core team and guest experts to speak about how they've used the platform. More about that course is available on their website.
Thank you to USIP for their support of the initial U4U program, to our colleagues who joined us to help teach, and especially to our participants who participated in this program.
Rob Baker
Director, Universities for Ushahidi