I left Kenya in June 2011 and returned in April 2025. Fourteen years. Long enough for a country to change shape underneath your memory of it.
The roads are better. China built expressways connecting Nairobi to its satellite towns and the airport. The Thika Superhighway exists. The Southern Bypass exists. You can move through the city at speeds that were impossible in 2011. This is real and worth saying before anything critical follows.
What is also real: Waiyaki Way, one of the busiest urban arteries in East Africa, does not have consistent lane markings. You navigate it by collective improvisation — drivers reading each other, filling gaps, operating a system that functions not because it is designed but because its participants have learned each other.
The infrastructure gap in East Africa is not primarily physical. The roads exist. What is missing is the institutional layer on top of them — the data, the systems, the decision tools that would let the people responsible for those roads know what is happening on them in real time. That gap is what this site exists to address.
I came back carrying fourteen years of observation from a country that had built that institutional layer, imperfectly and unequally, but visibly. A.I. Kung Fu is the tool archive from that vantage point. Sixteen open-source tools built for under-resourced institutions, NGOs, journalists, developers, and communities navigating East Africa with less opacity and more agency.
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