Final Preparations

In less than five days, I will leave to join my team in Kenya. It's amazing how quickly the time has flown by!

Three weeks ago we received our subteam assignments. I, along with Camy (Mexico), Lotem (Israel), and Kensuke (Japan) had been assigned to a project with the Kenya Vision 2030 Delivery Secretariat. Vision 2030 is Kenya's new development plan to transform Kenya into a globally competitive and prosperous nation by the year 2030. It is a very exciting initiative comprised of over a hundred social, political, and economic flagship projects, and I am extremely excited to be working with them.

The goal of our project is to develop the high level framework for a Vision 2030 dashboard; a dashboard will promote Kenya's open data policy and will also allow Kenya citizens and Vision 2030 stakeholders to quickly and easily access the progress of the various Vision 2030 projects. Last week, our team held our first meeting with our client to introduce ourselves and learn more about the goals of the project. Based on the results of this meeting, our team has been working to complete a work plan for our month in Kenya. We submitted the plan to Muriuki, our DOT partner, for initial review and will hopefully be submitting the final version to the client this week.

Over the weekend, I began the overwhelming packing process - packing for five and a half weeks is quite the challenge! I have a few more things to pull together before I leave Friday morning, but for the most part I am ready to go. My next post will be from Kenya; I am looking forward to arriving, exploring Nairobi, and meeting the rest of my team in person!