My friends at Ushahidi, an amazing team of creative Kenyans who built a dynamic system to allow for citizen reporting of violence during the post-election period in Kenya, have just rolled out a tool to help document violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The proxy war in Congo threatens to engulf the eastern part of that nation. While the conflict is getting good media attention, incidents are spread over a huge geographic area and there’s great danger that critical incidents will go unreported.

The Ushahidi team has launched a new version of the tool focused on the DRC, and is accepting citizen reports of violence and displacement - as well as of peace and humanitarian efforts - and people in the DRC can file a report by sending an SMS to 0992592111. I hope this effort will help people around the world get a sense for the scope of the DRC conflict and the hundreds of thousands of people it’s affecting.

This post originally appeared on Ethan Zuckerman's blog, My heart's in Accra.

Image source: Ushahidi