Ushahidi is a non-profit software company that develops free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping.

Ushahidi (Swahili for “testimony” or “witness”) created a website (http://legacy.ushahidi.com) in the aftermath of Kenya’s disputed 2007 presidential election (see 2007–2008 Kenyan crisis) that collected eyewitness reports of violence sent in by email and text-message and placed them on a Google map.

The organization uses the concept of crowdsourcing for social activism and public accountability, serving as an initial model for what has been coined as ‘activist mapping’ - the combination of social activism, citizen journalism and geospatial information. Ushahidi offers products that enable local observers to submit reports using their mobile phones or the internet, while simultaneously creating a temporal and geospatial archive of events.