Kenyan Wins the Impact Award at the DLD Women Conference in Munich for her Revolutionary Website

Monday evening saw, our very own Juliana Rotich win the Impact Award at the DLD Women Conference 2013 for her work on Ushahidi.com.

Juliana was born and raised in Kenya before going to Kansas University for her Computer Science degree. She lived in the US for over ten years before moving back to Kenya in 2011. She has a passion to be part of the revolution in Kenya thus her work in African tech and in renewable energy. She is a TED Senior fellow and  MIT Media Lab Director’s Fellow. She has been named Top 100 women by the Guardian newspaper; Top 2 women in Technology 2011, and Social Entrepreneur of the year 2011 by The World Economic Forum. She is also an advisor to the iHub in Kenya.

Ushahidi.com which was started and is directed by Juliana, is a website that came into being during the 2008 post election violence in Kenya. Bloggers and the online Kenyan community at the time used the site to share information on what was going on in different parts of the country when violence erupted. The website now falls under the company Ushahidi Inc. that “specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, interactive mapping and data curation. Ushahidi builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories.”

DLD (Digital-Life-Design) is a global network on innovation, digitization, science and culture which connects business, creative and social leaders, opinion-formers and influencers for crossover conversation and inspiration. DLD holds two major events annually, the DLD conference and the DLD Women conference, both of which are invitation only events.