It is almost 3 years to the day that I sent out a plea to Kenyan bloggers and techies to help me build what would become Ushahidi.

Since then it has been a crazy ride…from producing an incredible open source platform and working towards scale, to building and working with an incredibly talented team, to seeing multiple uses of Ushahidi around the world, to numerous awards and press mentions.
For me, what has always been the most important aspect of the work we do has remained simple, building a tool that makes it easy for individuals and groups to tell their stories, and making it easy for… ( Read on! )

The recent “Women in Tech” (disaster) panel at Techcrunch reminded me of a long overdue post I’ve been wanting to write on the absence-of- women-in-tech debate that’s being doing the rounds over the last few months.

Part of it revolves around the far too common prevalence of all (white) male panels/speakers at top tech conferences…a phenomenon I’m all too familiar with (as the pinch-hitter diversity rescuer I seem to be morphing into)… and part of it is around low numbers female-founded start-ups & tech companies.

I’m happy to see that the conversation is moving away from… ( Read on! )

I’ve just finished reading a fascinating article in Open Democracy about the collapse of the Greek economy and what it will take to fix it. While Greece and Kenya are fundamentally different countries, I was struck by how well the author unpacked the underlying dysfunction of Greece as a country and an economy and how some of the issues apply to the Kenyan economy today.

Don’t have anything clever to add to the article’s analysis, just want to point out the things that stood out for me.

For starters, the author notes:

In a small-scale economy households make different choices from… ( Read on! )

So I was busy admiring the photographs taken by Jessica Hilltout in the NYTimes that are part of her book, Amen, where she explores “grassroots soccer” where “the beautiful game exists in its purest form” when something about the article that accompanied the images bothered me.

At first, I was like there you go again you sensitive African…the book does after all capture the ingenuity of young kids who come up with beautiful soccer balls from the most improbable materials.

…and then via (the-fantastic-blog-you-all-should-read) Africa is a Country, I read Jessica’s… ( Read on! )

If you’ve been following my tweets lately you can tell that World Cup fever has set in for me. And it’s not just because I’m living in Johannesburg.

I’ve had a long love affair with football thanks to my late father. You see I was *the* quintessential daddy’s girl (in many ways I’ve inherited both his best and worst traits) and for the first few years of my life I was pretty much attached to his hip…all his workmates at the airport knew me, all the waiters at his favorite drinking spots knew me (especially at the Thorn Tree in the then New Stanley where he liked to have a… ( Read on! )