01/About us
An independent research firm built on public data.
Registered in Kenya. Headquartered in Lamu County. Deliberately not in Nairobi.
Who we are
Afrigender Analytics Limited is an independent economic research and data consultancy registered in Kenya and headquartered in Lamu County.
We were founded on a straightforward observation: most of the information needed to hold public spending to account in Kenya is already published — in budget implementation reports, audit reports, census volumes and county plans — and almost none of it is read, analysed or translated for the communities it describes.
We do that translation. We take public data, apply proper economic method to it, and publish findings that a ward administrator, a county assembly committee and a peer-reviewed journal can each use. Where the data does not yet exist, we design the study and collect it.
We are deliberately based outside Nairobi. Research about counties is usually commissioned in the capital and flown in for a week. We think evidence produced by people who live with the findings is better evidence — and we build the local analytical capacity to keep producing it.
—/Vision & mission
Vision
An Africa where no significant economic decision is taken without knowing who it reaches — and who it misses.
Mission
To produce rigorous, disaggregated economic evidence for policy, and to build the local analytical capacity that sustains it — with particular attention to how public resources and economic opportunity reach women and underserved communities.
—/Why Lamu
Why locally produced evidence is better evidence.
Lamu is about to be measured a great deal. A port, a transport corridor, a livestock quarantine zone, a ginnery, refineries and plantation projects all generate data about this county — and almost all of it is collected, analysed and interpreted by people who do not live here.
Research commissioned in the capital arrives with a fixed timetable and leaves with the dataset. The enumerator who did not understand the question, the household that gave the expected answer rather than the true one, the seasonal pattern that makes a single-visit survey misleading — these are invisible from Nairobi and obvious from Mokowe.
Being based here is not sentiment. It is a method claim: proximity improves instrument design, improves enumeration, and makes it possible to go back and check. It also means the analytical skill stays in the county after the contract ends, which is the entire premise of the Lamu Data Lab.
- Registered office — Mokowe, Lamu County
- LAPSSET corridor, indicative alignment
—/Research philosophy
Independence, and what it costs.
A consultancy that depends on repeat commissions from the institutions it evaluates has a structural incentive to produce comfortable findings. Everyone in this sector knows it; almost nobody writes it down.
Our answer is procedural rather than rhetorical. Clients commission the question, the method and the scope — never the answer. Every output states what the data cannot support. Institutions we analyse see the findings in draft and their reply is published alongside ours. Analysis built on public records is released openly, so anyone can check the arithmetic.
These commitments are written down precisely so they are costly to break. Some assignments do not survive them, and we decline those.
The six standards of practice →
On measurement
An average tells you what happened. Disaggregation tells you who it happened to. Where a dataset cannot be disaggregated by sex, location or income, we say so — because a finding that hides its distribution is not yet a finding.
Who is behind the work.
The firm is led by Dr. Lodis Akol Michael, an economist with eighteen years inside Kenyan public institutions before he studied them formally.