Angela Oduor Lungati, Listening at Scale, Building Civic Technology That Hears

Angela Oduor Lungati does not build apps that dazzle; she builds systems that listen. Growing up in Nairobi, Kenya, she watched institutions talk about communities more than to them, and she found that gap not only frustrating but unjust. That early frustration became a calling: how does technology elevate the voices of those historically unheard?

Her journey through the world of technology began with volunteer work during Kenya’s constitutional referendum in 2010, where a budding civic-tech platform called Ushahidi, “testimony” in Swahili, was helping ordinary people share real-time information about post-election violence. Angular, analog and unpolished, that platform spoke truths that official channels obscured. Lungati saw potential in this model: data generated by communities, for communities, can inform responses, policy and accountability.

She eventually rose through ranks at Ushahidi, starting as a software-development intern and evolving into its Executive Director in 2019. Under her leadership, Ushahidi remains a globally influential civic-tech organisation, used in more than 160 countries to track elections, monitor crisis response, document human rights abuses and amplify community voices. Lungati insists tech must be listening technology, that is, platforms designed to absorb the day-to-day realities of people in the margins, rather than imposing top-down solutions.

Her advocacy reaches beyond civic systems into how technology is governed and designed. In 2024 she was recognised as a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader and named a Mozilla Rise25 Honoree for advancing inclusive and accountable AI and civic tech, honours that reflect her work to expand digital inclusion and ethical tech leadership.

Lungati’s leadership style is relational. She speaks about communities in conversational terms: WhatsApp groups, barazas, market barrows, places where people already gather and talk. Her current initiatives explore how AI-powered translation and messaging systems can extract and elevate insights from natural conversational data, turning everyday communication into actionable intelligence for local governance and decision-making.

For Lungati, technology is not a substitute for citizenship, it enables it. Her work insists that innovation must begin with questions communities ask about their own futures and that data without voice is just noise.