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Status: activeType: 🏛️ civic techCountry: Kenya Website: mzalendo.com
Status active
Type 🏛️ civic tech
Country Kenya
Website mzalendo.com
Contact info@mzalendo.com
+254 726 464 063
Concepts Democracy Tools E Government Radical Transparency Representative Democracy Parliamentary Monitoring
Last activity 2026-08-25 dod
Site checked and page created: about, our-work, scorecard, elections and contact pages all live; Elections Watch 2027 tooling published ahead of Kenya's next general election

Mzalendo

Mzalendo — patriot in Swahili — is a Kenyan parliamentary monitoring organisation (PMO) founded in 2005 and run by Mzalendo Trust from Nairobi.1 It exists to make the work of Kenya's National Assembly and Senate legible to the people those chambers represent: what each member said, how they voted, which committees they sat on, and what happened to the constituency development funds allocated in their name.

Its mandate is explicitly anchored in Kenya's 2010 Constitution rather than in a generic transparency agenda. The organisation cites Article 118(1) — Parliament "shall conduct its business in an open manner" and "facilitate public participation and involvement in the legislative and other business of Parliament and its committees" — as the constitutional basis for what it does, and organises its programme around three themes drawn from that text: openness, inclusion, and accountability.2

What it runs

  • MP and senator profiles — biodata, contributions, motions, bills, statements and petitions for every elected representative, plus voting records and performance rankings
  • A searchable Hansard and committee-report archive
  • Bonga na Mzalendo — a structured channel for citizens to submit views on bills, which Parliament's own public-participation process often makes hard to use3
  • Annual Parliamentary Scorecard — a yearly assessment of the sitting Parliament's performance
  • Elections Watch — gazetted results for every seat, each row linked to the Kenya Gazette notice it came from, currently covering 2022 and building toward 2027
  • Public Finance Observatory — constituency-level allocations and project tracking

The organisation's stated ambition is regional rather than national: its mission is to "promote open, inclusive, and accountable Parliaments in Kenya and Africa," and it explicitly counts sharing methods with other parliamentary monitoring organisations in the region among its flagship activities.4

Why it belongs in the landscape

Mzalendo is the Kenyan member of a small international family of parliamentary monitoring organisations that this landscape already tracks in other countries — They Vote For You and the OpenAustralia Foundation in Australia, mySociety in the UK, and the Parliamentary Monitoring Group in South Africa. All of them attack the same accountability sink: a legislature that is technically public but practically unreadable, where the record exists but no citizen can realistically use it.

What distinguishes Mzalendo is the constitutional hook. Where equivalent organisations elsewhere argue that legislative openness ought to exist, Mzalendo can point to text that says Parliament must facilitate it — which turns a transparency campaign into an enforcement question.

Key people

  • Caroline Gaita — Executive Director
  • Ory Okolloh — board member; also a co-founder of Ushahidi, the crisis-mapping platform built after Kenya's 2007 election crisis5
  • Website: mzalendo.com
  • Our Work — the three-theme programme in full
  • Publications — research on legislative openness, digital participation and marginalised groups' political participation

See also

  1. "Mzalendo is a Kenyan non-partisan Parliamentary Monitoring Organization (PMO) started in 2005", About ✓ Verified, Mzalendo, retrieved 25 August 2026. ↩

  2. "Parliament shall (a) conduct its business in an open manner, and its sittings and those of its committees shall be in public; and (b) facilitate public participation and involvement in the legislative and other business of Parliament and its committees”. (Art. 118 (1))" About ✓ Verified, Mzalendo, retrieved 25 August 2026. ↩

  3. "Bonga na Mzalendo is how citizens and Parliament talk to each other — safely and securely." Bonga na Mzalendo ✓ Verified, Mzalendo, retrieved 25 August 2026. ↩

  4. "Sharing lessons and experiences with Parliamentary monitoring organisations" Our Work ✓ Verified, Mzalendo, retrieved 25 August 2026. ↩

  5. "Our Board Ory Okolloh" About ✓ Verified, Mzalendo, retrieved 25 August 2026. ↩

History