AHADI.
Kenya Public Accountability Platform
A national platform that records what Kenyan leaders promise, from the President down to Members of County Assembly, and tracks what actually happens next: started, delayed, stalled, or completed, with dated, sourced evidence behind every entry and a journalist standing behind every publication.
"Ahadi ni deni." (A promise is a debt.) Ahadi is the Swahili word for promise.
About this document. This guide explains what Ahadi is, why it exists, and how it works, for citizens, journalists, leaders and their offices, and anyone evaluating the platform. Ahadi is a civic technology initiative for Kenya, built on the principle that every promise a leader makes in public should remain a matter of public record. It is a sibling initiative to UWAZI, a separate proposed platform for public finance transparency.
Start Here: A Guide for Each Reader
Ahadi serves several audiences at once. This section points each one to what matters most to them.
Citizens
Read Parts 01 and 02 for what Ahadi does and why it matters. Part 08 walks through exactly how to search for your leaders, read a promise's history, and report something you have seen, with evidence, to the newsroom.
Journalists & newsrooms
Part 03 covers the full life cycle of a promise record. Part 07 explains editorial roles, the audit trail, and how to get newsroom access. Part 10 sets out the neutrality and correction standards every entry is held to.
Leaders & their offices
Part 04 explains exactly what data is recorded about a promise and what counts as evidence. Part 10 covers the standing right of reply: any leader or their office can have an official response recorded and displayed next to any promise concerning them.
Developers, researchers & partners
Part 09 covers the technical architecture in plain terms, plus a short technical summary for engineers. Part 11 is an honest account of what is built and verified today versus what remains on the roadmap.
What Is Ahadi
A single, searchable national record of what Kenya's elected leaders have promised, and what has happened since.
Ahadi is a public accountability platform built around one simple idea: a promise made in public by an elected leader should stay on the public record until it is delivered, or until it is honestly marked as delayed, stalled, or abandoned. Not summarised from memory. Not left to whoever shouts loudest on social media at election time. Recorded once, with evidence, and updated as things actually change.
The platform covers every level of elected office in Kenya: the President and Deputy President nationally, Governors, Senators and Women Representatives at county level, Members of Parliament at constituency level, and Members of County Assembly at ward level. A citizen can search their own location, or a specific leader's name, and see every promise tied to that seat, in one place, with a dated history of what has happened since it was made.
A record you can check
Enter your county, constituency or ward and see who represents you, what they have promised, and how far each promise has actually gone.
A tool, not a replacement
Ahadi is built for journalists to publish through, not to publish instead of them. Every entry is created or reviewed by a verified newsroom account.
A fair, factual record
Every promise is dated and sourced. Every leader has a standing right of reply. Nothing is published as an accusation; everything is published as a documented fact with its source attached.
What Ahadi is not
Ahadi does not rate leaders on popularity, ideology, or personal opinion. It does not accept anonymous, unverified claims for direct publication. It is not affiliated with any political party, and it does not accept political sponsorship. It records what was promised, what evidence exists, and what has happened since, and nothing else.
Why This Matters
Kenya has a well documented trust gap between citizens and the leaders who make promises to them.
Public trust in Kenyan government institutions has been declining for years, not rising. According to the Edelman Trust Barometer's 2025 findings, only 38 percent of Kenyan adults say they trust government to do what is right, a further decline from the year before. Afrobarometer's research over the past decade shows trust in the ruling party falling from 61 percent to 38 percent, with confidence in the national electoral commission sitting even lower. A growing majority of Kenyans say they believe political leaders routinely mislead the public, a concern that has been rising since 2021.
This is not an abstract statistic. It shows up directly in how elections are fought and how leaders are judged once in office. Campaign promises are made loudly, at rallies and in manifestos, and then rarely revisited in any organised way once the campaign is over. By the next election cycle, most voters are working from memory, rumour, or whatever a candidate's opponents choose to remind them of, rather than an actual, verifiable record.
Article 35 of the Constitution of Kenya gives every citizen the right to information held by the state, and information held by another person where required for the exercise of any right. Article 232 requires public officers to be held accountable for administrative acts. Ahadi does not invent a new right; it makes an existing one practical, by putting the record in one searchable place instead of scattered across newspaper archives, parliamentary Hansards, and county gazette notices that most citizens will never think to look up.
Ahadi's premise is straightforward. If a promise was made in public, in front of a camera, a crowd, or a parliamentary record, then a citizen has a reasonable claim to know whether it happened. Making that record easy to find does not fix a trust gap by itself, but it removes one real barrier: the sheer difficulty of finding out.
How Ahadi Works
The life of a promise, from the moment it is spoken to the day it is delivered, delayed, or dropped.
Every promise on Ahadi moves through the same disciplined process. Nothing skips a step, and nothing is published without a named journalist or editor taking responsibility for it.
Why a full history matters more than a single status
A promise that says only "completed" or "not completed" hides most of the story. Ahadi records the full sequence instead: when it was promised, when funding was approved, when work started, whether it stalled and why, and when it finally finished, or did not. Each entry in that sequence carries its own evidence and its own source. Reading the whole timeline tells a citizen far more than a single status label ever could.
Anatomy of a Promise Record
What information Ahadi actually records, and what counts as acceptable evidence.
| Field | What it captures |
|---|---|
| Leader & position | Who made the promise, and the specific office they held at the time (a promise stays attached to the term it was made under, even after an election). |
| Date made | The exact date the promise was spoken or published, not the date it was entered into the system. |
| Deadline | Any stated completion date, where the leader gave one. Left blank rather than guessed when none was given. |
| Budget | The stated cost of the promise, where disclosed. Left at zero rather than estimated when no figure was given publicly. |
| Category | Infrastructure, health, education, water, security, environment, economy, governance, legislation, or youth and ICT. |
| Location | National, county, constituency, or ward, tied to the actual administrative area the promise applies to. |
| Status & progress | The current state of the promise, and a percentage estimate of how far it has progressed. |
| Evidence | One or more sourced items: video, audio, an official document, a photograph, or a news report, attached to every entry in the timeline. |
| Reported by | The named newsroom or journalist account responsible for that entry, visible on the public record. |
| Right of reply | An optional, clearly labelled response from the leader or their office, shown separately from the newsroom's own reporting. |
Status lifecycle
Every promise sits in exactly one of six states at any given time. The label is chosen by a journalist, backed by the evidence attached to that update.
| Status | What it means |
|---|---|
| Promised | The promise has been made and recorded. No visible action has been confirmed yet. |
| In Progress | Confirmed activity is under way: funding approved, a tender awarded, construction started, or similar. |
| Delayed | Work is behind its stated timeline, but has not stopped entirely. |
| Stalled | Work has stopped, with no confirmed activity for a meaningful period, and no completion in sight. |
| Completed | The promise has been fulfilled, confirmed by evidence such as a completion certificate, site visit, or official record. |
| Abandoned | There is clear evidence the promise has been dropped: funds redirected, the project cancelled, or no explanation given after an extended period of inaction. |
Acceptable evidence includes video or audio of the promise itself, official transcripts, parliamentary Hansard extracts, gazette notices, budget and procurement documents, dated site photographs, and reporting from established news outlets. A citizen's tip alone is never sufficient for publication; it becomes part of the record only once a journalist has reviewed it against evidence of this kind.
National Coverage
Ahadi is built for the whole country from the start, not piloted in one county and expanded later.
The geographic structure of Ahadi mirrors Kenya's actual system of devolved government. Search by location and the platform resolves every level of representation for that area: which county, which constituency, which ward, and who currently holds each seat. This is the same structure used in Part 08 for how citizens actually search the platform.
| Level | Office | Seats nationwide |
|---|---|---|
| National | President, Deputy President | 2 |
| County | Governor, Senator, Woman Representative | 141 |
| Constituency | Member of Parliament | 289 |
| Ward | Member of County Assembly | 1,448 |
A deliberately honest approach to who is listed
Every seat above exists in Ahadi's directory, searchable by name and location, whether or not a verified leader record has been attached to it yet. Where a leader's identity has been checked against multiple independent sources, their name is shown. Where it has not yet been verified, the seat is shown clearly as pending verification rather than filled with a guessed or unconfirmed name.
A platform that puts a name to a real person's office needs to be right, not just complete. Filling in a plausible sounding name for a seat that has not actually been verified would risk a citizen mistaking an unverified guess for their real representative. Ahadi treats an honest "pending verification" as strictly better than a confident wrong answer.
As of this document's publication, the President, the Deputy President, three county Governors, and six constituency MPs have been verified against multiple independent sources and are shown by name. Every other seat is visible in the directory and awaits verification as the newsroom grows. See Part 11 for the current, honest count.
Accountability Scores & Comparison
A single, explainable number, built from the promise record itself, not from opinion polling.
Once a leader has published promises on record, Ahadi calculates an accountability score out of 100, built from four measurable components. Nothing in the formula is a judgement call by an editor; it is a calculation over the leader's own recorded history.
Illustrative example only, not a real leader's score.
Delivery
The share of a leader's promises that reached "completed," reduced when promises are marked stalled or abandoned.
Transparency
How much verifiable evidence backs each of a leader's promises on average. More sourced updates, higher transparency.
Budget efficiency
Reduced when promises run past their deadline or stall outright, since delay and inaction both carry a real cost.
Average progress
Where a leader's promises currently stand overall, including the ones still under way.
A leader with no published promises yet shows no score at all, rather than a default or an assumed zero. A score only exists once there is a real record to calculate it from.
Comparing leaders
Any two leaders can be compared directly: promises made, completed, delayed or stalled, completion rate, and overall score, side by side on the same scale. This is designed for the moment that matters most, when a voter is deciding between an incumbent and a challenger, or comparing their own representative against a neighbouring seat.
The Newsroom Model
Journalists are the gatekeepers on Ahadi. There is no automated system that publishes claims on its own.
This is a deliberate design choice, not a limitation waiting to be automated away. Extracting a "promise" reliably from a speech, in English, Kiswahili, Sheng, or a mix of all three, is a genuinely hard problem, and getting it wrong at scale would put false claims into a record meant to be trusted. Ahadi keeps a person accountable for every entry instead.
| Role | Can do |
|---|---|
| Journalist | Create new promise records, log dated timeline updates with evidence, record a leader's right of reply. |
| Editor | Everything a journalist can do, plus reviewing the citizen report queue, and closing a leader's term (resignation, death, impeachment, election loss) with a successor recorded. |
| Admin | Full editorial access, including account and platform-level administration. |
Every action is logged
Ahadi keeps an audit trail of every editorial action: who did it, exactly when, and what changed. This is not a feature that can be turned off. It exists so that if a claim is ever disputed, there is a clear, timestamped record of who published it and why, and so that the platform's own conduct is as accountable as the leaders it tracks.
Access is authenticated, not open
Newsroom accounts require a verified login before any record can be created or changed. Passwords are never stored in plain text. Every write action, not just login, is checked against the account's role before it is allowed to happen.
For Citizens: How to Use Ahadi
No account is required to search, read, or compare. An account is only needed to report a tip.
Ahadi's biggest practical value is often local: what has actually changed in your own ward, not just national headlines. As more MCA seats are verified and more ward-level promises are recorded, this becomes the most directly useful part of the platform for day-to-day accountability, not just at election time.
Technology & Security
Built to be verifiable and hard to quietly tamper with, in plain terms first, then in technical detail.
Ahadi is built as two separate pieces: a public website anyone can browse, and a database and programming interface behind it that only authenticated newsroom accounts can write to. Nothing on the public side can change the record directly. Every change goes through the newsroom system, and every change is logged.
Why a leader's office is separate from the person holding it
An MP for a given constituency and the person who happens to hold that seat today are treated as two different things in the data. When a leader resigns, dies in office, is removed, or loses an election, their term is closed with a reason and a date, and a successor is attached to the office going forward. The outgoing leader's full history stays exactly as it was. Nothing about a resignation or an election result requires rewriting the record.
Technical summary
A React front end serves the public site. A Node.js and Express backend exposes a REST API. Data is held in a relational database with leaders, offices, and terms modelled as separate, linked tables, so that election results and resignations never overwrite history. Authentication uses hashed passwords and signed session tokens, with role checks enforced on every write endpoint, not just at login. Every promise update carries its own evidence records rather than a single overwritable status field. The architecture is built to scale from a single-server deployment toward a larger database with read replicas and caching as usage grows, without a redesign.
Trust, Neutrality & Editorial Standards
The single biggest risk to a platform like this is being seen, correctly or not, as favouring one side.
Ahadi is built around a small set of standards that are not optional and not adjusted case by case.
No political sponsorship
Ahadi does not accept funding or sponsorship from political parties, candidates, or their affiliated organisations.
Every claim is sourced
No promise, and no status change, is published without dated, attributable evidence behind it.
Corrections, not deletions
If a published entry turns out to be wrong, it is corrected with a new, dated entry explaining the correction, not silently edited or removed.
A standing right of reply
Any leader or their office can have an official response recorded and shown clearly alongside any promise concerning them, at any time.
Consistent standards across every party
The same evidence bar, the same status definitions, and the same review process apply regardless of party, region, or office.
Applies equally to Ahadi itself
Every editorial action is logged and attributable. The platform holds its own conduct to the same transparency standard it asks of leaders.
Current Status & Roadmap
An honest account of what exists today, what is verified, and what comes next.
Full national geography
All 47 counties, 289 constituencies, and 1,448 wards are mapped and searchable, with directory pages at every level.
Verified national leadership
The President and Deputy President, three county Governors, and six constituency MPs are shown by name, checked against multiple independent sources.
Real national promises
Recorded national-level promises are drawn from actual public statements, not invented examples, each with its official source noted.
Remaining leader verification
Senators, Women Representatives, most MPs, and every MCA seat are mapped but await a verified name, added as the newsroom confirms each one.
Newsroom onboarding
Expanding from a small founding newsroom to additional verified journalists and partner outlets across the country.
Notifications & API access
Following a leader or a location for updates, and an open, read-only data interface for researchers, media houses, and civic organisations.
It would have been straightforward to fill every seat with a plausible name and every promise with a plausible story. Ahadi does not do that. Directory structure without a confirmed name is honest. A confident, unverified guess is not, and once trust in a specific record breaks, it is hard to win back trust in the rest of the platform.
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions from citizens, leaders, and newsroom partners.
Is Ahadi affiliated with any political party or the government?
No. Ahadi is an independent civic technology initiative. It does not accept political sponsorship, and the same standards apply to every leader regardless of party or office.
Can a leader or their team get a promise removed from the record?
No. A published promise stays on the record. If a leader disputes how it is described, the correct route is a recorded right of reply, or evidence supporting a correction, which is added as a new, dated entry rather than a deletion.
What happens when a leader resigns, dies in office, or loses an election?
Their term is closed with a stated reason and date, and a successor is recorded going forward if one exists. The outgoing leader's full promise history remains exactly as it was, unchanged and still searchable.
Is my report to the newsroom anonymous?
Contact information is optional when reporting a tip. If you leave it, it is used only so a journalist can follow up on your report, and it is not published.
How is a leader's name verified before it is published?
Against multiple independent sources: official government or parliamentary records, and at least one established news outlet. If that bar is not met, the seat is shown as pending verification instead of a name.
Does Ahadi use artificial intelligence to detect or write promises?
No. Every promise record and every timeline update is created or reviewed by a named journalist or editor. This is a deliberate design decision, not a temporary limitation.
Who can see the audit log?
Newsroom editors and admins can see the full audit log of editorial actions on the platform, as part of holding Ahadi's own process to the same standard it asks of the leaders it tracks.
A Debt That Should Stay on the Record
"Ahadi ni deni," a promise is a debt, is a common Swahili saying, and it is the idea the platform is named for. A debt does not disappear because it is inconvenient to remember. Ahadi exists to make sure a public promise does not either: recorded once, with evidence, held open until it is honestly resolved, and available to any citizen who wants to check.
Ahadi is not finished. Most of Kenya's elected seats still show pending verification rather than a confirmed name, and the platform's real value grows with every journalist who joins and every promise that gets recorded. That is by design. A national accountability record built honestly, one verified entry at a time, is worth more than one built quickly and wrong.
About Ahadi
Ahadi is a civic technology initiative for Kenya, built on the principle that journalists, not automated systems, should stand behind every claim published about a public leader. It is a sibling project to UWAZI, a separate proposed platform focused on public finance transparency, sharing the same underlying commitment to making public information easy to find and hard to quietly bury.