We’re building Africa’s
data infrastructure

I started GadaInfo because I lived the problem. Working with NGOs that relied on ODK for field data collection, I watched teams struggle just to build a form — writing XLS configurations, debugging skip logic syntax, wrestling with deployment. I kept thinking: why can’t this be as simple as drag and drop?

But the deeper pain wasn’t building forms. It was what happened after. At Worldreader, where I worked on education programs, we’d collect field data and then spend days cleaning it, formatting it, and passing it to the M&E team. Every time a different stakeholder needed a different view of the same data, the whole process restarted. New exports. New filters. New wait.

If an organisation like Worldreader struggled with this, I knew larger ones — government agencies running programs across entire countries — must be drowning. And they are. Many spend tens of thousands of dollars a year on analysts, BI tools, and developers just to make sense of data they already collected.

As a Mastercard Foundation Scholar, I later read the Foundation’s own research describing this exact challenge at continental scale. They noted that organisations in Africa are “still in the nascent stages of data collection and lagging in their engagement with big data analytics.” Through ADEA, they’re now supporting 30 countries to harmonize fragmented education and labor market data — because the infrastructure to do this simply doesn’t exist.

That’s when the idea crystallised: what if the solution isn’t more coordination between broken tools — it’s better infrastructure? What if the platform itself could collect data, understand it, and deliver insights to every team automatically — in real time, even offline?

That’s GadaInfo. Not a form builder. Not a dashboard tool. Data infrastructure — where collection, intelligence, and action happen in one layer. Built by someone who lived this problem, for the continent that needs it most.