Historica Canada Blog

To those unfamiliar with Kenya’s dusty, remote and under-developed Tana Delta it may seem like an odd place to launch a mobile technology-based project. However this region accommodates both mud huts and modern mobile phones without difficulty. Kenyans have embraced the mobile revolution fully and the residents of the Tana Delta are no different.

During the month of February I took a leave of absence from my job at Historica Canada to undertake fieldwork with The Sentinel Project, a Toronto-based non-profit organization which seeks to prevent atrocities across the globe through the innovative use of technology. Our work brought us to this region after we identified the role of misinformation as an inciting factor of the violence growing out of community rivalries formed by competition over scarce resources.

Our team, comprised of Kenyans and Canadians, spent the month setting up the infrastructure and gathering baseline data for an initiative named “Una Hakika?”. ((Swahili for ‘Are you sure?’)) The program is a neutral information network that aims to counter misinformation and propaganda through in-person and mobile interaction that will relate researched and verified reports to the community. Lacking local sources of reliable information, the region has seen outbreaks of violence based largely on rumours, the willful dissemination of false reports and outright propaganda. An additional benefit of the initiative will be the ability to send information directly to residents of the region to provide an early warning system for disasters, both natural and man-made.

We hope to demonstrate the effectiveness of this initiative in order to make it available to counter similar issues in regions across the globe. To learn more visit The Sentinel Project.

Drew Boyd is a military historian who works for Historica-Canada and volunteers with The Sentinel Project.