Fired: Daudi Were is accused of improper conduct.
One of Africa’s most famous tech start-ups is embroiled in a sexual harassment scandal.
Nairobi-based Ushahidi rose to prominence in 2008 when it developed crowd-sourcing software to map incidents of violence in the wake of the disputed 2007 Kenyan election. The information it collected was instrumental in revealing the full extent of the conflict, in which more than 1 000 people died.
Since then, its software has been deployed across Africa and around the world. It has helped to document sexual harassment in Egypt, locate survivors of an earthquake in Haiti, monitor attacks on civilians in Syria, and even to track incidents of violence and intimidation in the wake of the United States’ general election last year.
Ushahidi is an often cited case study of how technology can revolutionise the way that information is produced and shared in Africa, to promote accountability and democratisation. It is also a major player in Kenya’s growing tech scene, known as Silicon Savannah, and a darling of international donors, attracting funding from the Omidyar Network, Ford Foundation, Google, the Knight Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation and USAID, among others.
But now the not-for-profit is in the headlines for all the wrong reasons. Last week, former employee Angela Kabari went public with allegations of sexual harassment against Ushahidi’s executive director Daudi Were. She said her experiences were not isolated and castigated the Ushahidi board’s failure to deal with her complaint.
“Such predation is enabled by a culture of silence and secrecy that encourages victims of harassment to ‘not make a fuss’ or ‘persevere’ or ‘just ignore him until he gets tired or bored and goes away’. This culture leads many, many victims to not call out predatory behaviour and report it as the violence it actually is,” Kabari said.
For a company built on notions of accountability and transparency, these are serious allegations – and it was slow to respond. Too slow, said co-founder Ory Okolloh, who left the company in 2010.
“While ‘investigations are still underway’ months after the allegations of this specific case came to light, and as we await the outcome of that process, we as a tech community must examine the series of events that led us to a point where an organisation and community that is well placed to do better has failed,” she said.
Finally, on Sunday, Were was fired by the Ushahidi board with immediate effect. The board also issued a formal apology to Kabari, although this failed to respond to Kabari’s criticism of the board itself.
“We are sorry that this happened to you. We are sorry for your pain. This was an inexcusable offence,” it said in a statement.
For Kenya’s growing tech community, this incident serves as a painful reminder that it needs to provide better safeguards for its employees.
“If we want to protect those working in these areas, or anywhere else, we need to protect the values of respect, equality and openness, not specific organisations or people,” Okolloh said. “The start-up ecosystem in Kenya is no longer nascent; it can and must handle the hard work and tough conversations that will happen in the coming weeks and months.”