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Africa: It’s Time to Boldly Rewild the Digital Jungle

#LongRead In the early, heady days of the internet, a boundless frontier of digital innovation was promised—a digital utopia where anyone could make their mark. Fast-forward to April 2024 and this dream has been co-opted by a handful of tech behemoths, leaving Africa a mere spectator ...

Reflections from IGF2022: The opportunity for Africa

See #IGF2022 reflections on Digital Reflections Last week, I attended the Internet Governance Forum (IGF2022). By the end of it, I have had several reflections about what the opportunities there are for Africa. These are the conversations that I am really hoping to have and hear ...

The barriers to citizen engagement

The Open Institute works in two main ways as regards government - citizen relations. First, we promote proactive government transparency and second, we work with citizen groups and CSOs to foster active citizenship.  Government transparency has in the past decade been achieved, to some level of success, by ...

A teenager’s pregnancy changed the destinies of two people forever.

Here's the story of how Benjamin Katana dropped out of school to become a breadwinner https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rc9w9dPUlPk Benjamin tells the story of how he became a breadwinner When I started telling you the stories of Kenyans who don't exist despite the fact that you see them every day as ...

To thrive, professionals must go rural

https://twitter.com/__sammich__/status/1411246935151976455 This week I took interest in seeing a tweet by an engineer who I understood to express tongue-in-cheek, her frustration in being unable to find “innovative engineering” work. This, she said, despite having gone to university for 5 years. I took a moment to ask ...

These are ways to make people count

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote here about Mama Furaha, a woman that I met that does not officially exist and how many people don't count. I have so many more stories of real people and I will be telling you about them. One ...

There are people who don’t exist (Story 1)

The story of Mama Furaha and her group (Kilifi County). There are people who live in Kenya but don't exist. Mama Furaha is 40 years old this year - at least that is her estimate because she is not exactly sure which day she was born. ...