Founded by Dennis Onyango and Sharon Adongo, Kenya’s Uwazi, a data and technology consulting firm aims to help organizations efficiently manage their data and programs apart from it being a leading Salesforce Cloud Consulting Partner in East Africa.
Speaking to TechMoran, Adongo said, “We started Uwazi because we wanted to solve the pain points organizations and businesses have with M&E, program management, and data organization as well as maintaining adequate and scalable in-house technical capability. Our work is primarily focused on Salesforce because it allows you to build custom relational databases, streamline and automate organizational workflow, and store all your data on the cloud thereby reducing overall operation costs.”
Adongo added that Uwazi aims to make it easier for organizations and businesses operating in East Africa to unlock growth opportunities through insightful data. This entails setting up systems that are optimized for data collection & organization, central contact management, program monitoring & evaluation and organization-wide collaboration.
The firm has already worked with 6 reputable organizations across different sectors, including Akili Dada, ILRI, TechforTrade, Open Capital Advisors, eMobilis and Save The Elephants and are signing up more others by the day.
Though they face competition from tech companies that provide local ERP/CRM solutions, as well as the other two Salesforce Partners in the region, Uwazi has distinguished itself through a combination of quality product, excellent customer service and a fair pricing model. Access to a community of Salesforce partners worldwide also means Uwazi has the ability, through knowledge sharing, to implement the best technical and business solutions across different verticals.
Onyango and Adongo founded Uwazi Consulting in December 2014 and make money from the technical implementations they do for clients. They also make money on software licenses, depending on the business model of the client.
Uwazi is now working in collaboration with a local firm to develop data and technical solutions that have excellent offline functionality to allow them to extend their reach beyond major towns within the country. In the long-term, Uwazi is working to expand into the larger East African region; into Rwanda & Burundi and they have the experience and skills to take on the region.
Onyango has a bachelor’s degree in technology with a major in Electronics (Hons) from the University of Eastern Africa, Baraton. He has previously worked for Sanergy and The BOMA Project, leading teams in designing and implementing solutions on the Salesforce platform. He is a Certified Force.com Developer and Certified Salesforce Administrator. Adongo has a BA in Science, Technology & Society, with a correlate in Computer Science from Vassar College in New York. She previously worked for Samahope in San Francisco, developing systems to streamline donor-organization-beneficiary relations.