Recently our neighbor country Chile suffered a devastating earthquake. I have many friends there and most of them lived near the epicenter of the quake. It was very difficult to try and find them and it felt horrible to not be able to help more. The risk of this happening in Peru is quite high too. In fact in 2007 a 7,9 magnitude earthquake stroke the south of Lima leaving a high death toll (around 1,000) and lot's of damage to constructions, buildings and infrastructure.
This risk makes all of in Lima worry about the possible outcome of a huge earthquake, since we haven't had one in over 40 years. The mobile phone penetration in Lima is very high and more complex phones are becoming cheaper, making enabling a software like Ushahidi really simple. How will this help during an earthquake. I think it's similar to what happened to Haiti. We need to find centers of people around the world that will help us map the city accurately and have a software that can leverage the GPS in the phones to locate where news are coming from.
This is just one of the uses of this technology. Lima is also a very insecure city and Ushahidi can help police, local municipal police and people to report crimes in nearly every part of the city and aggregating it all on a map so citizens can see what areas to avoid at what times and authorities can trace where to improve or double their security efforts. Also this could help identify bands or how they move and some patterns that will make it easy for the police to be aware of where to look for them.
This ability can also help women in and the fight against domestic violence. Since kids have early access to computers and cellphones from an early age they can too benefit from this initiative.
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