About

I came to Kenya on a Fulbright in 2010, expecting to stay a year. I ended up helping build the research department at iHub, Nairobi’s first tech co-working space, during the years the East African tech ecosystem was first taking shape. I have been based in Nairobi ever since.

I have a PhD in Sociocultural Anthropology from UC Irvine, completed in 2021. The experience that spurred me to do a PhD was the sense that certain communities were “over-researched” and felt extracted from the research process – including the middle/upper class Kenyan techies at the iHub as well as some of the residents of Kibera, East Africa’s infamous informal settlement across the street. Why does research produced on and about communities tend to serve the knowledge needs of those elsewhere?

In the years since, I have raised over $5.7 million in funding, built and led research teams across East Africa, and grown CSIDNet from a conversation into a network of researchers working on climate, health, and community-led knowledge production. The thread across all of it is the same question: how do you build sociotechnical infrastructures that enable real collaboration without reproducing the hierarchies you set out to challenge? Fifteen years of experimenting and getting that right and wrong in different contexts is what I bring to the work now.

I work with a small number of organizations each year, mostly international research networks, foundations, and knowledge organizations in the open science and philanthropy reform space, working on high-stakes convenings, research capacity building, or governance decisions (where the structural choice and the values claim are not aligned).

I try to write about what I think about these questions on this site. If you want to talk, please reach out!