Recognised internationally as a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum in 2011 and listed as one of the Time Magazine 100 Most Influential People in 2014, Ory Okolloh is one of Kenya’s best minds.

She was one of six Kenyans named in the 2015 Quartz Africa Innovators list by a US-based digital media outlet, Quartz. In the same year, Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company — the world’s leading source of intelligent information for businesses and professionals — appointed her to its board of directors.

Even before joining Google, where she was the public policy and government relations manager for Africa, Okolloh was already the globally acclaimed co-founder of Mzalendo (Kiswahili for ‘patriot’) a site used as a parliamentary watchdog and Ushahidi (or witness), a crowdsourcing site used to record eyewitness accounts of injustice through text messages, email, Twitter and Google Maps.

Okolloh served as the executive director of Ushahidi from its establishment until 2010. The technology developed and used by the website has since been used to monitor elections, traffic movement and political injustices in various countries.

She is a frequent speaker at conferences including TED, World Economic Forum, Clinton Global Initiative and Mobile Web Africa.

In these conferences Okolloh’s main speech topics include citizen journalism, technology in Africa and the youth’s role in shaping Africa’s future. She is a board member of the Africa Media Initiative, the World Bank Service Delivery Indicator Committee, the World Bank’s Council of Eminent Persons, and an advisory board member for Code for All.

She has worked at Covington and Burling, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights and as a Chayes Fellow at the World Bank Department of Institutional Integrity.

Okolloh holds a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh and a law degree from Harvard Law School. She is currently director of investments at Omidyar Network’s Governance and Citizen Engagement Initiative in Africa, a position she took up after moving from Google.