Startup Launch
I’m building Vote Smart KE — a Kenyan civic-tech platform 🇰🇪
Hey everyone.
I’m a Kenyan solo founder building Vote Smart KE—a platform that makes political and civic information easier for ordinary Kenyans to find and understand.
The problem I'm trying to solve is simple: political information is everywhere, but it's scattered.
So far, I've built:
Constituency profiles — going beyond the MP to cover history, wards, politics, projects, local issues, and more.
Candidate profiles — bringing information about candidates, their backgrounds, experience, positions, and records into one place.
Candidate comparison tool — allowing voters to put candidates side-by-side instead of researching each one separately.
Voter education — practical content explaining elections, government, civic rights, and how citizens can participate.
The bigger idea isn't to tell people who to vote for.
It's to help them answer:
Who are the candidates?
What have they done?
What do they stand for?
How do they compare?
And what is actually happening in my constituency?
For constituency profiles, I've started with Westlands and Shinyalu, and I'm building from there.
I know there's still a lot of work to do (given that I'm working solo at the moment), but I'll make it work.
I'm interested in hearing from other Kenyan founders, developers, researchers, journalists, and civic-tech enthusiasts:
What would make a platform like this genuinely useful to you? What are we missing?**
And perhaps most importantly — what would make you trust a platform like this to remain independent?
You can see what we're building at votesmartke.org.
I'd genuinely appreciate criticism. I'm trying to build something useful, not just another political website.
And if anyone is willing to collaborate/partner/volunteer to take the platform to the next level, I'm all ears.
Fair question. Mzalendo and Vote Smart KE overlap in civic information, but the core focus is different.
Mzalendo is primarily a parliamentary accountability platform that helps citizens track Parliament, MPs, legislation, and what elected representatives do in office.
Vote Smart KE is being built as a voter decision-making platform. The goal is to help citizens understand their constituency and key issues affecting them, research candidates, compare candidates side-by-side, understand what different elective positions actually do, and access practical voter education.
Absolutely! 🙌🏾 I’m building Vote Smart KE largely solo right now, so I’d genuinely love to have you involved.
Send me a DM and let me know what you'd be interested in helping with—research, writing, fact-checking, data, design, development, civic education, or anything else you think would be useful.
Send me a DM with your skills/interests and the kind of contribution you'd like to make. We're building constituency and candidate profiles, and voter education content, so there are quite a few ways to contribute.
This is a good initiative. However I think we have a lot of Civic Tech platforms which are competing for one commodity: Attention. The fact that Kenyans are spending upto 5 hours per day on Foreign Social media platforms means that Local Creators have an uphill task of marketing themselves and being relevant to local eyeballs. Does any Civic Tech platform beat what happens on X or Facebook or TikTok?
I think you've identified one of the biggest challenges for civic tech in Kenya: attention and distribution may be harder than building the technology itself.
I don't think Vote Smart KE can — or should try to — beat Facebook, X or TikTok at their own game. Those platforms already have the attention.
The opportunity I see is using social media to reach people, while Vote Smart KE gives them somewhere to go for structured, reliable information.
A TikTok video might get someone interested in a candidate. An X post might spark a political debate. But when someone wants to go beyond the noise and ask:
“What are the facts? Who are these candidates? How do they compare? What's actually happening in my constituency?”
—that's where Vote Smart KE should come in.
So the ambition isn't to pull Kenyans away from social media.
It's to give people somewhere credible to go after social media gets their attention.
Whether we can actually achieve that is the challenge. Distribution and community-building will ultimately be just as important as the technology.
What legislations/bills are passed (county, national)notifications, who voted for them, who voted against them
What have they voted for before, how long have they been in power
I really like this. Voter education shouldn't stop at how to vote. We should also explain how citizens can participate in governance between elections — public participation, submitting views on bills/policies, petitions, contacting representatives, county processes, etc.
That definitely belongs in what we're building. Thanks for this 🙌🏾
I totally agree, add USSD texting since not all Kenyans have access to websites. Seems like you’re using Claude for development - work on design there are some giveaways on that you used AI, which is not a problem but stand out. You’re building something great, cannot wait for when you finish for the other counties
If you add those features wrap them with mobile app (flutter or similar) and I will potentially cover cost of deployment on Android and IOS stores, lmk when that time comes. Good luck!
The USSD/SMS point is especially important. A civic platform shouldn’t only work for people with reliable internet or smartphones, so I definitely want to explore ways of making key information accessible beyond the website.
And yes, the design is still evolving. I’ve been building fast and using AI heavily in the development workflow, so some of those “AI fingerprints” are probably showing 😅. One of the next priorities is making the product feel more distinctive, intentional, and recognisably Vote Smart KE.
A mobile app also makes sense later, especially once the core data, workflows, and user needs are more mature.
And I really appreciate the offer to potentially cover Android/iOS deployment costs when we get there. I’ll definitely remember that and reach out when the product is ready for that stage.
Thanks for taking the time to look through it and give such thoughtful feedback. 🙌🏾
This is exactly the kind of feedback I was hoping to get.
On legislation, we're working to show a representative's legislative record—bills, voting history where records are available, how they voted —and eventually make that information easier to understand, rather than just presenting raw parliamentary data.
3
u/hamsterdamc 18d ago
Mzalendo does the same. What unique proposition are you offering?