Why we exist Principles Investigations Open data Work with us
An independent African research lab · Nairobi

Africa is increasingly being datafied. We make it work for the public.

Public Interest Algorithms investigates the data systems and algorithms shaping African public life — and builds the continental capacity to question, audit, and direct them.

Why we exist

Visibility is power.
We are democratising it.

The continent is becoming data.

Every registration, transaction, diagnosis, and vote across Africa now leaves a digital trace. Identity systems, mobile money, platform feeds, and government databases are converting African life into data at a pace no institution was built for.

This is not a threat to be feared or a trend to be cheered. It is a resource to be governed.

Data decides what becomes visible.

What gets measured gets seen, and what gets seen gets funded, fixed, and scaled. Datafication makes solutions visible — which clinics work, which farms thrive, which policies deliver. But visibility is never neutral. Algorithms decide whose problems count, whose solutions surface, and whose lives stay legible only as risk scores.

Capacity is concentrated. That is the problem.

Today, the power to make African data speak sits with a handful of platforms, vendors, and distant institutions. When the capacity to analyse, audit, and act on data is concentrated, digital transformation happens to Africans rather than through them.

So we democratise the capacity.

We investigate the algorithms deployed in the public's name — by governments, platforms, and private actors — and publish every dataset, method, and finding openly. And we train a continental bench of researchers, journalists, and regulators to do the same.

Data about Africa should work for Africans. Our job is to make that sentence enforceable.

What we stand on

Four principles. Every project answers to all of them.

P—01

Democratic governance of digital resources

Data, algorithms, and digital infrastructure are public resources. The publics they govern must have a say in how they are built, bought, and used.

P—02

Human rights

No system is too innovative for rights. Privacy, expression, and non-discrimination are the floor of every deployment, not a trade-off against it.

P—03

Justice

We measure systems by their distribution of harm and benefit. An algorithm that works on average but fails the marginalised has failed.

P—04

Human prosperity

The point of digital transformation is flourishing — livelihoods, health, voice. We hold technology to the standard of what it does for people's lives.

Open by default

Our evidence lives in the public domain.

Prompts, datasets, codebooks, analysis scripts, and methodology notes are published with every investigation — so a team in Lagos, Dakar, or Lusaka can rerun our designs for their own context. Replication is our capacity-building strategy.

prompts/battery + translations
data/coded outputs, anonymised
analysis/notebooks + scripts
codebook.mdharm taxonomy
METHODS.mdshow your work
Question everything.

Regulators, funders, newsrooms, researchers — if an algorithm is shaping public life on this continent and nobody is checking it, we want to hear from you.

Start a conversation → hello@publicinterestalgorithms.africa