A number of you may not know Ushahidi, but it is a Kenya n tech company with a mapping platform that is used for crisis response, human rights reporting and election monitoring.

The COVID-19 pandemic has necessitated a global move by governments to contain the virus and it includes tracking people that were infected and quarantine people.

Well, Ushahidi announced that they will be waiving full fees for the Ushahidi basic plan which will allow users to access the full feature set of the platform. Starting 17th March 2020, they will make the basic plan free for 90 days.

Ushahidi says that interested users should sign up for a hosted deployment here and use the coupon code 100OFFCORONAVIRUS.

This basic plan will allow you 1 deployment, 25 admins, unlimited posts, web/email/SMS/Twitter data collection, data visualization and importing and exporting data.

The company strongly advises people to follow guidelines issued by local authorities, avoid sharing misinformation and fake news, avoid storing personal information that is not critical for your work and not storing medical information that can be linked back to a person.

Ushahidi says that people can support existing projects like one in Italy and Japan. They also said that they are ongoing talks with the local tech community on how to fill information gaps which will be shared soon.

This is a pretty cool move by Ushahidi and this can be used quite well by the government or related NGOs to surface additional information and support coordination efforts.