Technologies are tools; nothing more, nothing less. They can be used for good or ill and implemented in the context of for-profit companies, nonprofits, or social enterprise hybrids. Many women want to address the thorny technical issues of global importance. They seek not only a return on their investments, but a social return as well—a way to leverage technology and entrepreneurship for a greater good.
Imagine going back to your native country with your husband and new baby to cast one of the most important votes of your life, only to witness an election overtaken by violence and your country spiraling out of control. That was exactly the situation in which Ory Okolloh found herself at the end of December 2007 and the first few weeks of 2008. She transformed that experience into Ushahidi, a website that allows ordinary citizens to collect, record, and crowdsource eyewitness accounts of violence and crisis information using text messages on simple cell phones and Google Maps.
A Kenyan national, Okolloh suddenly found herself caught up in the aftermath when the postelection violence broke out. Because of what she called “self-censorship” in the Kenyan media, her personal blog became a hub for people seeking a fair election and postelection coverage and for family members searching for loved ones, particularly in the Rift Valley. “I was posting updates every hour, every two hours, and it got to the point that if I didn’t blog, people were like, hey, what’s going on? How are you? I'm worried. People were desperate. They couldn’t reach their relatives.”
Her blog became not only a clearinghouse for crucial information, but as only one woman writing and editing content, it also became a “choke point”—a bottleneck to the flow of information. She wrote on her blog that there must be a better way to crowdsource citizen journalism and crisis reporting. “My firstborn was only ten months old,” said Okolloh. “It was indeed a tough decision as I went to stay in Kenya until the crisis was resolved, in order to help get information about what was going on out there. I insisted that my husband take our child and return to South Africa, but he wouldn’t hear of it.” In the end, Okolloh decided it was best to return to Johannesburg, but what she had experienced remained at the forefront of her mind. It was on the flight back home that the idea of Ushahidi came to her. The idea was for people to submit reports directly to a site where the reports could be mapped using whatever tools worked for them—web or mobile.
A group of programmers joined forces with her and helped her build and launch Ushahidi, which means “testimony” in Swahili. Since then, the platform has been used to gather, map, and disseminate information in situations ranging from the conflict in Syria and the Congo to the 2010 “Snowmageddon” in New York City and the devastating 2011 earthquake and tsunami in Japan.
In the three years that Okolloh spent fundraising, building, and scaling Ushahidi, she worked out of her bedroom—hardly an easy task while raising children who would sometimes ask to come in and make a cameo appearance on her Skype calls.
“The practical challenges included the loss of income. I had to quit my job to make this thing happen,” she said. “Then there was all the guilt associated with juggling motherhood and the demands of a startup. But I was fortunate, first of all, to have had a very supportive husband, partner, father of my [now] three kids. And so in that sense Sheryl Sandberg is right—your partner really helps to frame a lot of these things.”
After Ushahidi, Okolloh went on to become Google’s policy manager for Africa, concentrating on issues of access, since the 2013 data provided by the International Telecommunications Union in Geneva showed that 2.7 billion people (nearly 40 percent of the world’s population) were online, but only 16 percent of the African continent were Internet users, compared to 32 percent of the Asian continent and subcontinent, 61 percent of the Americas, and 75 percent of Europe. Her focus was now to foster relationships between Google and African governments in countries where Google had offices: Senegal, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, Ghana, and South Africa and work to create a favorable regulatory environment for the burgeoning technology space in the continent.
“From Google’s perspective, the more Africans online, the better. Google wants more people using their products,” she continued, “so they are willing to invest in infrastructure building and local content in order to get more people online.”
In the meantime, Okolloh was becoming an expert on what life/work balance meant to her in the context of being ambitious, entrepreneurial, and socially conscious. Certainly, working for Google was intense, but she was also able to manage her own schedule by frequently working from home.
Asked about where her interest in technology came from, Okolloh pointed to her time at Harvard Law School and the Berkman Center specifically. “At the time, Berkman was attracting a lot of stars,” she said. It was a virtual Who’s Who of the Internet, blogging, tech conversation, and community spheres—among them, Rebecca MacKinnon, who had joined the center as a research fellow and founded Global Voices Online in collaboration with Ethan Zuckerman; Andrew McLaughlin, also a fellow at Berkman, who would soon leave his job of five years as director of global public policy at Google to become part of President Obama’s transition team in the Technology, Innovation, and Government Reform cluster (he would go on to become the administration’s deputy chief technology officer of the United States); and David Weinberg, an American technologist, also a fellow at Berkman, who was best known as the coauthor of The Cluetrain Manifesto, the 2000 classic primer on Internet marketing.
In the spring of 2013, she joined the Omidyar Network, a nonprofit run by eBay founder Pierre Omidyar. Her role as director of investments focused on Internet policy, government transparency, and citizen engagement in African nations, including open data movements. “We as Africans are well-positioned to help investments go to the right areas, and we need to make sure that, as the continent begins to facilitate a global dialogue regarding its investment potential, we’re not cut out of the conversation,” she emphasized. Women like Ory Okolloh were showing that the female presence in technology was not just reshaping how the world operated, but also growing the connections between entrepreneurship, problem-solving, and global awareness.