For the past one week, Nairobi has been hit by fuel crisis, a situation that many motorist view as an artificial shortage caused by commodity hoarding by oil marketers anticipating a price increase on fuel. Despite the government’s claim that there is 19 million litres of super oil in store, the situation is quite different at the pump stations. Motorists have to wait in qeues for almost 2 hours before they can fill their tanks.

In bid to help motorists find fuel, an operation dubbed “Find Fuel” started in twitter by Robert Kunga (@mwiringi) on Tuesday this week. He initiated the hashtag #findfuel to help Nairobi motorists identify petrol stations that had stock amidst the shortage. He aggregated the tweets on the MotoGari www.motogari.co.ke blog. Within an hour (1430-1530hrs), the tag was the most tweeted tag in the local scene.

Riding on the popularity of the find fuel twitter operation, Ushahidi Kenya started a website titled “Find Fuel in Nairobi” http://findfuel.crowdmap.com/main powered by crowdmap, a hosted version of Ushahidi platform. The website helps citizens to map and send real time alerts on all possible filling stations where there is petrol.

After crowdsourcing this information, the website has been aggregating data from Twitter and other web sources, harnessing the data and routing it to the “Find Fuel in Nairobi” site where real time reports have been generated to assist motorists. This same information has been passed on to radio stations, which have been airing the reports. The Ushahidi website also has features that enable people with access to twitter accounts to locate and track the availability of fuel in various sites through their phones.

Ushahidi is a non-profit tech company that specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, visualization and interactive mapping. The Ushahidi website was initially developed to map reports of violence in Kenya after the post-election fallout at the beginning of 2008. Since then, the website has grown as a collaborative platform for people to share their views.

It is clear that technology is increasingly becoming pervasive in Kenya. Kenyans seem to be ‘peculiarly’ innovative in the way they use technology. Increasing connectivity and communication channels have clearly brought about a more informed Kenya. The growing popularity of social media and the power of crowdsourcing is being leveraged to tackle common problems and create fast solutions for citizens.

Thumbs up to Soud Hyder, Phares Kaboro and Ahmed Maawiy (Ushahidi-SwiftRiver) who set up and managed the “Find Fuel in Nairobi” tool.