This is very interesting – moving the African storytelling to the mobile ecosystem where more people can get connected in this age. It is about mentoring and empowering. Story Spaces is just doing that. Working in partnership with Kuyu Project, they complement Ushahidi. They hope to inspire and motivate people to become better citizens.
StorySpaces can be helpful for crisis response as a crisis moves beyond immediate response, and looks at long-term recovery. Local residents in an affected area will benefit from being able to tell stories about their experiences and sharing with others who are affected. Also as stories are tagged and added to a specific StorySpace created for a specific crisis, the stories can be used by
- Local residents and governments for gathering information for planning long-term recovery actions.
- Those involved in providing psychosocial response – (e.g., to see what stories teens were telling about how they were coping in the months following a crisis)
- Families for reconnecting sharing stories with each other.
- Businesses to gather resilience stories from their customers and to use the stories to plan the best strategies of how the business will work to move forward.
- Non-profit organizations for sharing specific stories with residents, volunteers, and donors.
- Journalists for finding out leads to follow up on for more in-depth stories.
About the Kuyu Project
The Kuyu Project is a digital literacy initiative aimed at teaching African youth how to fully utilize social media and other digital tools to effect social change in their communities to achieve their goals and objectives.
We deeply believe that by offering an open platform and teaching digital techniques we are fueling the dreams and aspirations of these young minds which might one day lead to the innovations and technologically driven solutions that will change Africa and the world.