Brian Onang’o

I led the engineering across the whole chain rather than treating the meter and the software as separate systems. The platform was built around multiple meter manufacturers and communication technologies, so new fleets could be integrated without replacing what sat underneath.

Prepaid metering normally converts money into energy units at the moment of purchase. When a tariff rises, the utility ends up supplying energy against units that were sold cheaply months earlier. We designed the alternative: value is stored at the meter and the prevailing tariff is applied when the energy is actually consumed.

Alongside that, analytics comparing the energy supplied to an area against the energy billed there — the difference between technical losses and everything else. The platform was selected for deployment in Kenya's first smart city.

Today someone hands a national ID card to a stranger at a gate and has no idea where the details go. Sojaly inverts that. Identity is held by the person, and every disclosure is a request they approve, with a record of who asked and what was released.

The architecture uses holder-controlled credentials, consent-based disclosure, rotating identifiers and opaque tokens, so an organisation can verify a person without receiving or retaining more than it needs.

The same infrastructure carries access control, attendance and proof of presence, membership, patient-held medical records, device custody and voting — one verified identity rather than each institution collecting the same personal data again. I designed and implemented it end to end, from the identity and security model through the backend, APIs, web applications and Android client.

Farm software has generally been written for people who already understand accounting. The core platform is phone-first and activity-driven instead: farmers record what happened on the farm, and the system turns those records into costs, margins, labour payments and operational reports. The accounting runs underneath rather than dictating the workflow.

It also carries the field up to whoever is responsible for it, so an owner who is not on the farm — or who runs several — can still run them. And it lays a foundation for agricultural extension at scale, connecting farming practices to the financial and operational outcomes they actually produced.

Beyond farm management it extends into agricultural services and markets, connecting farmers to mechanisation, transport and veterinary services, and providing the software layer around partner-built agricultural robotics and equipment.