Ory Okolloh Mwangi is a Kenyan activist, lawyer, and blogger. She is Director of Investments at Omidyar Network. She was formerly the Policy Manager for Africa with Google.
In 2006 she co-founded the parliamentary watchdog site Mzalendo (Swahili: “Patriot”). The site sought to increase government accountability by systematically recording bills, speeches, MPs, standing orders, etc.
When Kenya was engulfed in violence following a disputed presidential election in 2007, Okolloh helped create Ushahidi (Swahili: “Witness”), a website that collected and recorded eyewitness reports of violence using text messages and Google Maps. The technology has since been adapted for other purposes (including monitoring elections and tracking pharmaceutical availability) and used in a number of other countries.
Okolloh has a personal blog, Kenyan Pundit, which was featured on Global Voices Online.
She has worked as a legal consultant for NGOs and has worked at Covington and Burling, the Kenya National Commission on Human Rights, and the World Bank.
Okolloh was appointed on the Board of Thomson Reuters Founders Share Company, the body that acts as a guardian of the Thomson Reuters Trust Principles in May 2015.
Born into a relatively poor family, she had said that her parents sent her to a private elementary school that they could barely afford, which set the foundation for what ended up being her career. She earned an undergraduate degree in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh and graduated from Harvard Law School in 2005. Okolloh lives in Nairobi, Kenya, with her husband and three children.
