Mulembe Nation is edited and reported by a small team of writers, data contributors, and researchers. We are based primarily in Nairobi and western Kenya, with contributors across the Great Lakes region.
Dr. Kevin Usagi Ememwa
Founder, Editor & Curator
kevin@mulembenation.co.ke
Dr. Kevin Usagi Ememwa has spent twelve years generating research in East Africa and watching it land without traction. Not because the science was wrong. Because the context was missing. The decisions that shape health, governance, and investment outcomes in the Great Lakes region are made by people working from data that does not capture how power, place, and community actually operate. Mulembe Nation is the first layer of the fix: a structured, computable context layer for the region, built from the knowledge systems of the communities it covers. The indices, the entity relationships, the place data are infrastructure. The publishing is how that infrastructure stays accountable to the people it is built on.
He is a physician, research ethicist, and ML engineer. Has contributed to NIH, NHIR, REACH-UHC and GDPC funded studies. WHO-certified in Ethics and Governance of AI for Health and MSc in Research Ethics, Moi University (ongoing).
Omwami Mwene
Section Editor — Politics, Business, Culture, Sport
omwami@mulembenation.co.ke
Omwami Mwene spent a decade writing policy briefs that ended up in filing cabinets. He understands institutional design the way a mechanic understands engines: not from the manual, but from taking things apart when they stop working. He moved into publishing because he got tired of analysis that stayed inside government buildings.
He covers politics the way he follows football: he is less interested in who scored than in why the defensive shape collapsed in the first place. He tracks cattle markets and commodity prices alongside legislative calendars because, in his view, they are measuring the same thing from different angles. He reads court filings the way other people read box scores.
When he is not writing, he is usually arguing about whether the 2010 Kenya Constitution was a genuine institutional reset or an elegant piece of aspirational fiction. He has not settled the question.
Sade Khalai
Section Editor — Travel, Food; Writer, Women in Society
sade@mulembenation.co.ke
Sade Khalai has lived in Mombasa, Kampala, Nairobi, and Dar es Salaam, and she will tell you that you can understand a city faster through its food markets than through any number of reports about it. She writes about food as a way of tracking movement: who is trading what, along which routes, with whose permission, and at what price.
Her travel writing is less about destinations than about the systems that make places work or fail. She covers women in society without making it a beat about suffering. She is more interested in the women running cross-border trade networks at Busia and Namanga than in any policy paper written about them.
She ferments things. She knows the difference between uji and ugli. She has strong opinions about nyama choma that she will share without being asked.
Ikine Akidivira
Section Editor — Humour, Human Interest
ikine@mulembenation.co.ke
Ikine Akidivira is the person at the meeting who notices the thing nobody says out loud and then writes it down. He covers the gap between how East African institutions present themselves and how they actually function, and he has found that the gap is usually funnier than either side intends.
He came to journalism through language. He is interested in the specific words politicians reach for when they are not telling the truth, the phrases that appear in official reports the week before something goes wrong, and the particular kind of silence that follows a question nobody wanted asked. He thinks humour is the most honest form of political analysis available.
He is from somewhere near Goma and will correct you if you get the geography wrong.
Mulembe Nation also works with a growing network of community data contributors, field reporters, and research partners across East Africa. If you want to contribute, see our Work With Us page.
