Blog
Notes from the field.
Bridging the Accountability Gap: How OI Rafiki Transforms Humanitarian Complaint Intake
Call center hotlines collapse, paper forms stall, and digital portals alienate beneficiaries without stable internet. Ona Insights built OI Rafiki, a WhatsApp-native AI agent that acts as a digital first responder for community complaint management — closing the accountability loop end to end.
BI in the Age of AI
Dashboards have been the default interface for data for years, and they're reaching their limits. Here's how self-service analytics, narrative analytics, and action-taking agents are reshaping BI — and what it takes to trust them.
From Multi-Day Reports to a 60-Second Conversation: The OI Lightagent
To prove that an AI assistant could turn raw operational data into plain-English answers, Ona Insights built the OI Lightagent and tested it end-to-end against a complete demo modelled on Kenya's community health system — architected from day one to connect to any organisation's database, in any sector.
What We Took Away from ICT4D 2026
In May, the Ona Insights team spent the week at the ICT4D Conference 2026 in Nairobi as both a sponsor and exhibitor. Here's what stood out from three days of honest conversation about data, AI, and development.
Ona Insights Visits AkiraChix to Talk Data, AI, and the Future of Analytics
At Ona Insights, we believe that the future of data in Africa is only as strong as the pipeline of talent we invest in today. That belief took shape recently when our team had the privilege of sitting down with a room full of bright, inquisitive students at AkiraChix.
Securing the Future of Feedback: CaseFusion CFMHub Achieves Grade A Rating
In the world of Community Feedback Mechanisms (CFM), data isn't just information, it's a trust exercise. We're excited to share the results of our recent, multi-phase security pentesting conducted in partnership with the United Nations International Computing Centre (UNICC) Redunit team.
Empowering Climate Accountability with Visual Storytelling
How Ona and UNICEF built NDCs for Every Child: A Digital Platform for Climate Accountability. Today, nearly half of the world's children live in extremely high-risk countries, exposed to severe climate and environmental hazards, shocks, and stresses.
Transforming Community Health Data Ecosystem
The Living Goods Data Architecture in Kenya: A Blueprint for Modern BI. As a technical partner to the Ministry of Health, Living Goods plays a critical role in supporting the Kenyan government's Universal Health Coverage Policy.
Standardizing the understanding of African Health Supply Chains
Strategizing Data Collection and Extraction. This inaugural piece in our Data Portals Blog Series focuses on the vital 'Extract' stage of data analytics projects — introducing a shared framework that enables comparable insights across 55 African countries for the first time.
Building UNICEF State of Palestine's Complaints Management System
UNICEF State of Palestine partnered with Ona to build its own Complaints Management System, based on the CFMHub platform Ona developed for UNICEF Sudan, later integrated with UN Women's Wasil system to share data across both.
Building Wasil: One System for Managing Community Feedback Across Agencies in Palestine
UN Women partnered with Ona to consolidate complaints and feedback data from multiple partner agencies in the Occupied Palestinian Territory into one shared system: Wasil.
Building a Data Warehouse for a Million Learners: Our Partnership with Imagine Worldwide
Since 2022 we've worked alongside Imagine Worldwide to design, build, and now stabilise a ClickHouse-based data warehouse that ingests data from thousands of solar-powered learning tablets across Malawi, Tanzania, and Sierra Leone — supporting their mission to deliver foundational literacy and numeracy to millions of children.
Introducing Ona Insights: Building Data and AI Systems for Social Impact
Over the past decade, I've had the privilege of working with some of the most forward-thinking organizations using data to improve lives across Africa and beyond — across public health, education, climate resilience, livelihoods, and humanitarian response.