Our team and vision
Team
Kamusi Yetu is founder-led today, with the long-term aim of growing into a wider network of engineers, linguists, educators, and community reviewers.
Eddie Ezekiel Ochieng
Founder, Product Builder, and Lead Engineer
I started Kamusi Yetu because too many Kenyan languages remain digitally underrepresented at the very moment language technology is accelerating globally. If our languages are missing from dictionaries, phrase banks, and machine-readable systems today, they risk falling even further behind in the AI era.
My role here is not only technical. I am shaping the product direction, data model, moderation workflow, and long-term translation architecture so this can become both a cultural asset and practical language infrastructure. The goal is to preserve vocabulary, support learning, improve translation, and eventually create better access to information across Kenyan and African languages.
“If our languages are absent from the systems shaping the future, then our communities are absent from that future too. Kamusi Yetu is one way of changing that.”
The potential benefits are practical as well as cultural: stronger education tools, better multilingual search, safer civic and health communication, richer language archives, and eventually sentence, document, and speech translation that actually reflects how Kenyans speak.
Why This Work Matters
Kenyan languages deserve to exist in modern digital systems with the same seriousness given to globally dominant languages. That means verified word entries, phrase context, audio, moderation, and eventually machine-usable translation data.
The Team We Need
The long-term team should include engineers, linguists, native speakers, moderators, educators, and partner organizations who can help grow the lexicon with quality and cultural accuracy.
Connected Work
A link to Usalama Voice
Kamusi Yetu also connects naturally with another project I am building: Usalama Voice, a Kenyan anti-GBV platform focused on emergency response, protected reporting, county referral access, and practical survivor-support guidance. The connection matters because language access is not abstract. In safety, justice, and support systems, a person may need to understand instructions, describe harm, or ask for help in the language they trust most.
Over time, the two projects could reinforce each other directly. Kamusi Yetu can help supply multilingual vocabulary, phrase packs, and translation infrastructure for reporting flows, safety prompts, learning modules, and county support directories inside Usalama Voice, making those systems more accessible to survivors, allies, and responders across Kenya.
That is part of the larger vision here: language infrastructure should not end at preservation. It should improve real systems that people rely on in education, healthcare, safety, research, and daily life, especially when clear communication can change outcomes.
Build With Us
If you work in language, research, moderation, education, or engineering, there is space to help shape the next stage of Kamusi Yetu.