Built for Kenya's devolved government
Six offices.
Six different jobs.
Hold the right one to account.
A Governor spends a county budget. A Senator scrutinises that spending. Toguna works out, from where a project's money comes from, which of your six elected offices is answerable for it — and which one merely represents you.
Working Android app · Every ward in Kenya loaded · Officeholders are placeholders, clearly marked
The problem
Ask a Kenyan who is responsible for the road outside their gate and you will get six plausible answers. The money tells you which one is right. NG-CDF makes it the MP's. The county budget makes it the Governor's — and scrutinising how he spends it is the Senator's constitutional job, not a favour.
So complaints go to whoever is nearest or loudest, officials deflect accurately because the road genuinely is not theirs, and citizens conclude that nobody is accountable. Nobody built the tool that says who is.
How it works
From where you stand to who answers for it
The core idea
The money decides who answers
Pick a fund. Every office's relationship to a project follows from it — and none of it is tagged by hand, which is how this scales to 1,450 wards without an editorial team, and how it avoids putting the wrong Senator's name on the wrong road.
Scoring
A Senator doesn't get an empty project list
A score is the share of pledged projects marked delivered and corroborated by citizens. Offices whose mandate is not delivery are never scored that way — a Senator's job is oversight, so their page carries a watchlist of the spending they are required to scrutinise, and a dash where a number would be a lie.
- Delivery scores, only where delivery is actually the mandate
- An oversight watchlist for scrutiny offices
- Manifesto pledges linked to the projects that fulfil them
- Petitions carrying the official's own response, or its absence
- “—” instead of a number, when a number would be dishonest
Counts of the country and of the data model. Not counts of users — there are none yet.
The data
Real boundaries, not a dropdown
Every one of Kenya's 1,450 wards carries its actual boundary polygon, published by the IEBC and released through the Humanitarian Data Exchange under CC BY. A location resolves to a ward by point-in-polygon inside the database, in under ten milliseconds — no geocoding API, no per-request bill, nothing to rate-limit.
Sixty-one row-level security policies decide what each account may read and write, and they live in the database rather than the app — so a bug in a screen cannot leak what a policy forbids.
Honestly
What's built, and what isn't
Working today
- Ward, constituency and county feeds
- Projects with budgets, phases and the accountability chain
- Leader scorecards and oversight watchlists
- Petitions, with the office's written response
- Office desks — representatives publish a manifesto, log projects, answer petitions
- Location detection and a searchable place picker for all 1,798 places
Not built yet
- Voter verification. Until it exists, signing a petition stays deliberately blocked
- A moderation back office. Reports are collected; nobody can action them yet
- The real officeholder roster. Needs a verified source, and keeping it current through by-elections
Every officeholder in the app right now is invented. They are named “Mfano” — Swahili for example — flagged in the database, and badged Sample on every screen they appear on. No real politician is named and none is scored. The database will not even allow a sample account to be marked verified.
The places are real. The people, the projects and the petitions are worked examples, so that anyone opening the app can see how it behaves before there is anything real in it.
The information already exists. It is in budget documents, CDF returns, gazette notices and county assembly Hansard, and it is effectively unreadable by the person whose road it is. Toguna is an attempt to put that in one place, and to be strict about the thing accountability tools are usually loose about: only ever asking of an office the thing that office is actually meant to do.
Who is building this
Thaiya Waronja
Lead product designer and developer
Toguna is a solo build: the Android app, the Postgres schema and its row-level security, the pipeline that turns the IEBC boundary files into the 1,450 wards the app resolves your location against, and this page. Funding is what turns that into something with a verification desk and a real roster behind it.