Ory Okolloh left a US law career to build tools that hold power to account. Ushahidi was one of them.
The Kenyan lawyer and blogger co-created the Ushahidi crisis-mapping platform and co-founded Mzalendo, a parliamentary watchdog site, before moving into venture investing.
Ory Okolloh earned a political science degree summa cum laude from the University of Pittsburgh and a law degree from Harvard in 2005. Then she turned down a job offer from a Washington law firm and went home to Kenya to work on government accountability.
Mzalendo and Ushahidi
In 2006 she co-founded Mzalendo, Swahili for “patriot”, a site that recorded bills, speeches and members of Kenya’s parliament. When violence followed the disputed 2007 presidential election, she co-created Ushahidi, Swahili for “witness”, a tool that collected eyewitness reports by text message and plotted them on a map. It has since been adapted for monitoring elections and even tracking the availability of medicines, and used in other countries.
Her blog, Kenyan Pundit, was featured on Global Voices Online.
From accountability to investing
She worked as Google’s policy manager for Africa and as managing director at Omidyar Network, and is now a partner at Verod-Kepple Africa Ventures, a pan-African firm based in Lagos with offices in Nairobi. She served on the board of Thomson Reuters’s Founders Share Company from 2015 until 2024, and was named to TIME’s 100 most influential people in 2014.
Her career shows how a blog, a tool and a conviction can grow into institutions.
