We are sad to lose a champion for community driven development

We are terribly sad to learn of the passing of our great friend, Chief Francis Kariuki of Lanet-Umoja location in Nakuru County, famously known as the Tweeting Chief, who passed on on October 21, 2020 after a short illness. We have lost a friend and brother-in-arms in the fight for hyper-local development and the attainment of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Chief Kariuki was a pioneer in many respects – he is the first chief to use Twitter as a tool for managing the affairs of his community. He provided visionary leadership as we worked together in his community to conduct a truly pioneering Citizen Generated Data project , that we called the Global Goals for Local Impact project.

In that project, we collected data from every household in Chief Kariuki’s Lanet-Umoja location and identified the community’s challenges and priorities. As a result of that project, thanks to Chief Kariuki’s great networking skills, each household got a water filter and he was able to check off the clean drinking water indicator in the Sustainable Development Goal number 6.

Chief Kariuki was a great man who proved that it doesn’t take a lot of money or national power to make change. All you need is commitment to your community and a great deal of friends. He made friends easily because of his great humility and wisdom and he drove many of us to be as passionate about his community as he was.

We shall miss the tweeting chief deeply and we hope that many more administrators will emulate him.