Kagonya Awori is the User Experience and Design Lead at Safaricom PLC. She has over 10 years experience in UX from all over the world including in Kenya, the UK and Australia. Kagonya guesstimates that she is one of less than 10 women in Africa with both a strong academic background and seasoned professional experience in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) - which is the field from which UX stems. It is no wonder that at her current role, she is leading the structure and practice of UX at the largest company in East and Central Africa ( that is Safaricom PLC).
Kagonya gained her academic background from four continents, a feat that makes her educational journey quite unique. She has a PhD in Computer Engineering from the University of Melbourne, , Australia ( she specialised in Human-Computer Interaction); a Masters in Human-Computer Interaction from Carnegie Mellon University (USA); and a Bachelors in Business Information Technology from Strathmore University, Kenya. The fourth continent is Europe given that her Masters degree was a dual one from CMU USA and CMU Portugal.
In 2012, Kagonya was part of the team that founded the iHub UX Lab, which was the first Design lab in East Africa dedicated to UX. She then went on to found WananCHI, an ACM SIGCHI local chapter, and co-hosted the first Tajriba, an annual UX workshop for students and entrepreneurs. Also in 2012, Kagonya co-created the Umati project, with the aim of investigating and curbing online hate speech. Umati was the first project globally to collect, analyse and synthesise hate speech reports en masse using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.
Intent on promoting Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) in and from Africa, Kagonya was technical co-chair for the inaugural conference for HCI in Africa, AfriCHI, in 2016. In 2014, Kagonya received the Google Anita Borg award for demonstrating outstanding academic achievement, leadership and community involvement in Computer Engineering, and received the Human Computer Interface/ Interaction Design Award sponsored by Microsoft Research SocialNUI Centre in 2016.
All these achievements and experiences have motivated Kagonya to explore technology design outside academia and employment. Together with her elder brother, Kagonya is the co-founder of Acacia Neuron, a health technology company that builds intelligent solutions to improve the experiences of clinicians and patients. Acacia Neuron has two products at various stages of growth. The first is a touchless biometric platform for facilitating secure access to information, while the second is a digital assistant based on Natural Language Processing of African languages.
What motivates Kagonya is the creation of technologies that solve African problems in ways that closely resemble African cultures, peoples, resources, knowledges and ways of life. In her free time, Kagonya greatly enjoys road trips, swimming, occasional hiking and mentoring young women.
