Afromusing is the personal blog of Juliana Rotich.

In Brief:
Kenyan, African, global soul, tech and renewable energy cheerleader. I firmly believe we are in the New African Century. Tech, particularly mobile, is transformative and can help African countries leapfrog to a better future.

Juliana Rotich Bio
Juliana Rotich is Co-Founder and Executive Director of Ushahidi Inc, a non-profit tech company, born in Africa, which specializes in developing free and open source software for information collection, interactive mapping and data curation.  Ushahidi builds tools for democratizing information, increasing transparency and lowering the barriers for individuals to share their stories. Through Crowdmap.com, Swiftly.org and accompanying mobile applications, Ushahidi is expanding its global footprint and making crowdsourcing tools available and useful.

Juliana has worked in the telecommunications and data warehousing industry for over ten years.  She is originally from Kenya, with a Computer Science degree from the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She is a Technologist, African Futurist and TED Senior Fellow.

She co- founded Mobisoko, a mobile marketplace for language and location relevant apps in Africa. She speaks at international conferences about technology, innovation, mobile technology, open source, and Africa. Past conferences she has spoken at include Lift, DEMO, TTI Vanguard, TransMediale, WSIS, DLD Women, Guardian Activate World Economic Forum -Davos, and ARS Electronica. She believes in the transformational power of technology to address social problems in the world, particularly in Africa.

She was named one of the Top 100 women by the Guardian newspaper and top 2 women in Technology 2011, and Social Entrepreneur of the year 2011 by The World Economic Forum.

High res photos. Credit, Robert Leslie

Recent Publications:
Open data and “crowdsourcing” can help developing countries make crucial decisions on energy planning:
The Press Release can be found here:
The Working Paper can be found here:

Digitally Networked Technology in Kenya’s 2007-2008 Post-Election Crisis: Co-authored with Joshua Goldstein. Available for download at the Berkman Center for Internet & Society – Harvard University.

News and Views:
BBC Digital Planet: Commentary on East African Broadband access. Listen to the podcast on this link.

To contact me:

I am involved with the following projects.

Ushahidi ‘Crowdsourcing Crisis Information’

AfriGadget Highlighting African ingenuity.

My Flickr