By Enrique Piraces, Vice President, Human Rights Program I write to let you know that after much thought and consideration, I’m leaving my position as the vice president of the Benetech Human Rights Program. I’m excited for the next chapter in my career and eager to see the work that the Human Rights team will […]
The Benetech Human Rights team is happy to announce the release of version 5.1 of Martus , our secure, free, open source information management and data collection tool for human rights defenders, activists, journalists, researchers, and civil society practitioners. In this version of the Martus desktop app, we have implemented significant user interface and user experience improvements, along with highly requested features. With these updates, Martus users can now more easily organize, find, and report on the information they collect to advance their goals.
In Summer 2013, Benetech Labs set out to create a platform that empowers water and sanitation community managers in Latin America to share best practices and improve their services, and that also enables institutional funders to evaluate investments in the water and sanitation sector. We’ve made excellent progress with this project and built a diagnostic tool to improve community-based water and sanitation providers’ capacity to provide water and sanitation services to their communities. I’m delighted to share that the Paraguayan government is now using our tool in a nationwide project that aims to advance access to clean water in the country. This is a major step forward in a collaborative effort to tackle the challenges that Latin American community water and sanitation organizations face.
My personal goal is to channel the aspirations of the technology community to do more social good. More and more of my time is spent around both raising money and raising awareness of how much more could be done with technology to increase social impact. In this update, I’m delighted to be able to share Benetech’s latest efforts to do both. First, I’ll cover our biggest fundraising effort of the year: individual philanthropy is crucial to us; it’s the portion that makes 10X impact possible! Then I’ll share the latest stories on the impact of our tech volunteerism and human rights tech efforts as well our new tech leadership.
Nominet Trust, a United Kingdom leading social tech funder, selected the Martus Project, an initiative of Benetech’s Human Rights program, among this year’s top 100 innovations using technology to drive social change around the world. The curated listed of these leading innovations, known as the Nominet Trust 100 (NT100), appears in the Nominet Trust’s 2014 Social Tech Guide.
