Giving Compass' Take:

• Koketso Moeti is utilizing technology in order to create more civic engagement opportunities. Activists can use their phones to coordinate events and better communicate their collaborative efforts. 

• How can other activists utilize the power of technology to strengthen their social impact? 

• Read about other organizations working with technology to unite it's purpose and create social good. 

When Koketso Moeti and her family in Rooigrond, an isolated community in the North West Province of South Africa, faced eviction, they decided to fight back.

Moeti, whose mother was part of the Anti-Apartheid Movement, began working with community members to organize and stop the local municipality from evicting the community.  It was then that she realized the power people can have when they join together to amplify each other’s voices.

“I recognized that people like me, who are most affected by poverty and other forms of injustice, corruption, and violence, are often seen as ‘voiceless,’” Moeti told Global Citizen. “But we are actually at the forefront of struggles for health, education, sanitation, and other issues to alleviate poverty.”

People advocating on behalf of their own communities are often the best positioned to speak up about their issues.

Technology can help to reduce the number of resources needed to make change, but digital tools can be prohibitively expensive to activists and advocates from low-income and marginalized communities. This was the problem Moeti wanted to solve — and it’s what led her to found amandla.mobi, a nonprofit community advocacy organization that aims to empower South Africans to become change-makers by democratizing technology and making it more accessible.

amandla.mobi works to harness the power of cellphones, which are widely used and available to almost all households in South Africa, and turn them into democracy-building tools. Its civic engagement platform helps connect activists across South Africa so they can strategically coordinate efforts and has more than 120,000 active users.

The organization’s innovative solution to amplifying to the voices of those hardest hit by poverty and injustice is what makes Moeti the recipient of the 2018 Waislitz Global Citizen Award.

Read the full article about harnessing technology for community power by Daniele Selby at Global Citizen