Akbr

Hi, I'm Akbr.

Software and data engineer in Kampala.

I build software for Uganda's official statistics. Lately that includes an AI assistant that answers questions from them.

Email me See the work
Akbr Kanyesigye, arms folded, smiling, in a black T-shirt against a white wall
Kampala, 2024

Hello. You turned me over.

There is a desk of old photos on this site. Type desk anywhere, or .

Now

What I'm working on these days.

  • A prediction market for Africa, in the spirit of Polymarket, where people can trade on the questions they already argue about here. Each market settles on a source anyone can check.
  • Sanyu, the Bureau's AI assistant for official statistics. I'm adding datasets and teaching it to draft statistical briefs.
  • A shared data portal that puts datasets from several government agencies in one place, so they can plan services from the same figures.
  • Open tools for census and survey teams: csync, which moves CSPro data in and out of your own code, and a skill that teaches AI assistants to edit CSPro apps.
  • TuuraHub, software that helps East African landlords manage their rentals. It's in beta, and I build it on the side.
  • Azure Data Fundamentals, the certificate I'm studying for after AWS Cloud Practitioner.

Notes

All notes

Work

All projects

A few recent things I've built.

Sanyu

2024 to now, AI

Uganda's AI assistant for official statistics.

You ask a question in plain language, in English or one of five Ugandan languages. Sanyu answers with the figure and its source, and it can also draw a chart or draft a short brief. The language model only decides what to look up. The number itself always comes from the statistics database, and Sanyu names the table and survey it came from.

We built it in-house at the Bureau, and Sunbird AI helped with the Ugandan languages.

  • 5,100+indicators from six official sources
  • 1,600+tables taken from published reports, each citeable by page
  • 40 mscold start, down from 30 to 60 seconds
  • 45golden-fact tests that run on every build

Node.js, SQLite, LLM tool calling, RAG, MCP endpoints, Python pipelines, Nginx and pm2.

statistics.ubos.org/sanyu
Sanyu's chat screen: a sidebar of data sources such as Census 2024 and CPI, and the prompt 'Ask Sanyu about Uganda's official statistics'

Census e-recruitment and field staff management

2023 to 2024, web platform

The system behind the people who counted Uganda in 2024.

Every district used it to recruit staff for the 2024 National Population and Housing Census and to keep their payroll records. The Bureau followed the whole effort on national dashboards. I was the main developer, and I ran the rollout.

  • 200,000+census staff it managed across the country
  • 80%faster fixes, once the tests and monitoring I added were in place

Next.js, MongoDB, Docker, AWS.

The national recruitment dashboard, showing applicant totals and a table of applicants per district

UBOS dissemination portal

2024 to now, data platform

Uganda's official statistics in one place, from more than six national datasets.

The 2024 census is live down to parish level, next to the Baseline Education Census 2025 and the Uganda Aquaculture Census 2025. Four more datasets are on the way, including the Malaria Indicator Survey 2024-25 and a poverty index built from the census. Each one opens as dashboards and maps, and you can download the tables.

I led the team of three that built it. I also wrote the pipelines that load the data and produce the reports, and a tool that pulls tables out of old PDF survey reports so people can search decades of them.

  • 6+national datasets in one place
  • 500,000+people have used it
  • 3people on the team I led

Python and SQL pipelines, Power BI, QGIS.

Visit statistics.ubos.org
The UBOS dissemination portal: the Census 2024, Baseline Education Census and Aquaculture Census cards, with four more datasets marked coming soon

csync, a sync tool for CSPro

2026, open source

Move CSPro survey data between a CSWeb server and your own code.

Most census and survey fieldwork in the region runs on CSPro. Tablets collect cases and sync them to a CSWeb server, but getting those cases into your own code, and back again, is hard. csync reads the survey's dictionary and handles that part.

You pull cases into a plain SQLite file and change them as ordinary Python dictionaries. When you push them back, csync adds the vector clocks CSEntry expects, so the changes reach the tablets. It works with any dictionary, whether that's a staff list or a full household questionnaire, and it talks to CSWeb 8.0 and 8.1. You can use it as a Python library or from the command line.

  • AnyCSPro dictionary, with no field names hard-coded
  • 8.0 and 8.1CSWeb versions it talks to
  • 0third-party packages the core library needs

Python's standard library and SQLite, with an optional Flask page.

csync on GitHub

See all my projects

Experience

Eleven years on one strip. Click a bar to jump to that role.

Any month Move across the strip to see what I was doing then.

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Official statistics

2022 to now

  1. Dec 2022 to now

    Software engineer

    Uganda Bureau of Statistics, Kampala

    My title is IT Officer, but I work as a software and data engineer on most of the Bureau's data systems, and I look after the cloud they run on.

    What I did
    • Built Sanyu, the Bureau's AI statistics service, and still run it. I rebuilt it to call structured tools on Node.js and SQLite instead of relying on vector search.
    • Wrote the Python and SQL pipeline that loads national statistics and produces reports, plus a tool that pulled 2,200+ tables out of published PDFs so people can search and cite them.
    • Led the team of three that built the dissemination portal, which more than 500,000 people have used.
    • Brought AI into the Bureau's data processing, starting with automatic coding of census and survey answers.
    • Built the census e-recruitment and field staff system on Next.js and MongoDB, which managed more than 200,000 staff.
    • Designed the data collection tools for the national count, and wrote Python and QGIS scripts that sped up map work.
    • Wrote the automated tests and monitoring for these systems, and help with user testing.
    • Set up and run the Bureau's servers on AWS and GCP, including Docker deployments and a shared outbound proxy.
    • Ranked the best-performing staff member on the 2024 census appraisal, and won the UBOS Innovation Award in 2025.

  2. 2016 to now, part-time

    Founder and director

    Rootless Technologies, Kampala

    A small studio that builds software for businesses and nonprofits in the region. Several of my civic projects went out through it, plus plenty of websites and the odd wedding portal.

Civic tech and government

2018 to 2022

  1. Feb to Nov 2022

    Technical lead, Makerere at 100

    Makerere University

    Built and ran the website for the university's centenary, where more than 12,000 people gave to the university or bought merchandise.

  2. Oct 2021 to Mar 2022

    Lead app developer, Youth Action Handbook

    European Union and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung

    I led the work on a bilingual Flutter app that teaches young peacebuilders in DR Congo, Rwanda and Uganda.

    What I did
    • Built every feature, including offline support for weak networks.
    • Published the app to the stores and rolled it out in all three countries.

  3. Nov 2020 to Mar 2021

    Lead developer, Uchaguzi voter platform

    Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung and the Ministry of ICT and National Guidance

    Led the team behind the WhatsApp chatbot and apps that more than 10,000 voters used during the 2021 general elections.

  4. Apr 2019 to Jan 2021

    Member, 4th Industrial Revolution Taskforce

    Ministry of ICT and National Guidance

    The President appointed me to a taskforce that studied the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution and advised the government on how Uganda should adopt them.

    The Ministry of ICT article

  5. Dec 2018 to Jan 2021

    IT specialist

    Government Citizen Interaction Centre, Ministry of ICT and National Guidance

    Built and maintained the government's main news site on Drupal and PHP, and looked after the centre's servers.

    What I did
    • Trained district technical officers around the country in IT and online communication. Afterwards, 30% more districts had active websites.

  6. Nov 2018 to May 2019

    Web and app developer, in charge of ticketing

    Africa Strategic Leadership Centre

    Built the Africa Now website and conference app, and ran online ticketing for close to a thousand delegates at the Africa Now Summit 2019.

Beginnings

2015 to 2018

  1. Aug to Nov 2018

    Travel sales intern

    Great Lakes Safaris, Kampala

    I sold safaris for a few months right after graduating. It taught me how customers actually decide.

  2. Jun 2017 to Apr 2018

    IT operations

    Airtel Uganda

    Led the intern team that built a leave system on Oracle Application Express, which cut approvals from several days to under an hour. I also worked on USSD services in Java EE and edited the 2017 Airtern magazine.

  3. Jan to Jul 2015

    Sales floor, then sales supervisor

    City Tyres, Nakawa

    Before university I sold tyres, and later supervised the floor team and its books. It's still the most useful management training I've had.

Papers and talks

Most of these are about using AI in a statistics office.

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Presented and accepted

  • 2026 Centralised validation and AI report generation: accelerating statistical dissemination at an NSO Akbr Kanyesigye, Ivan Atwiine, Francis Kayondo, Lawrence Mugula Poster

    We presented it at DSSV 2026, the conference on Data Science, Statistics and Visualisation in Trento, in the poster sessions on 29 and 30 June. The demo ran on poverty figures from the Uganda National Household Survey and on the 2024 census preliminary results. The abstract is on page 47 of the book of abstracts.

  • 2026 The impact of digital media and artificial intelligence on governance, national security, public opinion and socio-economic development in Uganda Syndicate 2, National Leadership Institute, Kyankwanzi Presentation

    Our syndicate's closing paper for the leadership course at Kyankwanzi, July 2026. It weighs what digital tools do for Uganda, like online services and census tablets, against harms like deepfakes and the 2024 breach at the Bank of Uganda.

  • 2025 From fragmentation to intelligence: automating national statistics with AI and machine learning Akbr Kanyesigye, Doreen Kirungi Maina, Ivan Atwiine, Allan Agaba Presented

    We presented it in Rome at the 10th SDMX Global Conference, which ran at the Bank of Italy from 29 September to 3 October 2025. What I took home.

  • 2022 Bringing FIDO2 to Flutter: development of a password-less authentication package for a cross-platform development framework Akbr Kanyesigye, supervised by Prof. Dr. Ahmet Rizaner Paper

    My master's paper at Eastern Mediterranean University, June 2022. The package is open source as flutter_fido2, and I gave a talk on it later that year, "Forget passwords: introducing password-less authentication using FIDO2".

Submitted in 2026

  • 2026 Grounding generative AI on census data for accurate government statistical dissemination Akbr Kanyesigye, Ivan Atwiine, Doreen Kirungi Maina, Allan Agaba

    dg.o 2026, the 27th International Conference on Digital Government Research, Omaha. A related abstract, "Evaluating statistical accuracy of retrieval-augmented language models for census data dissemination: evidence from Uganda", went to AIC 2026, the 9th African International Conference on Statistics, Nairobi.

  • 2026 Centralised validated data as infrastructure for AI-driven policy brief generation in government Akbr Kanyesigye, Ivan Atwiine, Francis Kayondo, Lawrence Mugula

    dg.o 2026, Omaha. A related abstract, "A staged automated validation framework for improving statistical data quality at national statistical offices: Uganda's experience", went to AIC 2026, Nairobi.

  • 2026 Launching Sanyu: Uganda's AI assistant for official statistics, and the accountability contract behind it Uganda Bureau of Statistics, with Akbr Kanyesigye as technical contact

    We proposed launching Sanyu with a live demo at the 10th Statistical Commission for Africa in October 2026, plus a side event on using SDMX to join national datasets. The five rules behind it.

Recognition

Small things I'm glad happened.

  • 2026LéO Africa Institute and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung
  • 2026National Leadership Institute, 30 July 2026
  • 2025Uganda Bureau of Statistics
  • 2025Amazon Web Services, valid to 2028
  • 2024Best-performing staff member on the Census appraisal, UBOS
  • 2022Class valedictorian, 4.0 of 4.0MSc Information Technology, Eastern Mediterranean University
  • 2019Presidential appointment, Ministry of ICT and National Guidance
  • 2019BSc Information Systems, Makerere University
  • 2017Editor, Airtern magazineAirtel Uganda's intern publication

Education

I finished both degrees with First Class honours and as class valedictorian. Below them are the courses and certificates I've picked up along the way.

Degrees

  • Feb 2021 to Jul 2022 MSc Information Technology Eastern Mediterranean University, Famagusta, Cyprus First Class, 4.0 of 4.0 CGPA, class valedictorian

    My main project was a Flutter plugin that lets people sign in with FIDO2 instead of a password. The coursework went deep into project management.

  • Sep 2015 to Jan 2019 BSc Information Systems Makerere University, Kampala First Class, 4.47 of 5 CGPA, class valedictorian

    For my final-year project I built a platform with web and Android apps to track school shuttles. I was also active in the Rotaract Club of Makerere.

Programmes and courses

  • From 2026 Huduma Fellowship, class of 2026 LéO Africa Institute and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung

    A leadership fellowship for people who work in Uganda's public and civic service.

  • Jun to Jul 2026 Political Education, Transformative and Leadership Development Course National Leadership Institute, Kyankwanzi Completed 30 July 2026

    A residential course on patriotism and political education, with military training and time on the shooting range.

  • Jan to Jul 2019 AI mentee Makerere Artificial Intelligence Research Lab

    I worked in Python on spotting cassava diseases and on a model that predicts land values in Ntinda. I also attended Indaba X Uganda 2019 on deep learning.

  • May to Dec 2020 CS50's Web Programming with Python and JavaScript Harvard University, through edX
  • Jul 2016 Cisco Certified Network Associate course Makerere University

Certifications

  • Sep 2025 AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner Amazon Web Services Valid to Sep 2028

  • Feb 2023 Blockchain Innovation Program BSV Blockchain

    A ten-week BSV Academy course on the cryptography behind Bitcoin and on writing Bitcoin apps in Go and JavaScript. CapitalSavvy and Satoshi Block Dojo ran the East Africa cohort in Kampala from October 2022. About the programme

  • In progress Azure Data Fundamentals, DP-900 Microsoft

Toolkit

The tools I use, grouped by job.

Data and BI
SQL (T-SQL and PL/SQL), dimensional modelling, ETL pipelines, Power BI, pandas and NumPy, QGIS and spatial data, SDMX.
AI
LLM tool calling, grounded question answering over statistical databases, RAG, MCP, automated report generation, model integration, Agent Skills.
Cloud and operations
AWS, GCP, Docker, CI/CD, Linux and RHEL, Nginx, Apache, pm2, Windows and Linux deployments.
Web and mobile
React, Next.js, Node.js, Django, Flutter, React Native, WordPress, Drupal, CodeIgniter, Oracle APEX, Figma.
Databases
Oracle, SQL Server, MySQL, Postgres, SQLite, MongoDB.
Languages
Python, JavaScript and TypeScript, SQL, PHP, Dart, Java, C#, Kotlin, Swift, C.
Testing and QA
pytest, node:test, Vitest, regression suites with golden facts, monitoring, UAT support.

Beyond work

  • Running

    I started a small running group for beginners in Kiwatule. It later merged with other groups to become AKA Run Club.

  • Rotary

    I joined Rotaract at Makerere, and I'm a Rotarian now.

  • Wedding committees

    Among my friends, I end up on every wedding committee, and I usually build a small site where the committee can track pledges and guests. The latest was for Conrad and Vanessa.

  • An old car

    A friend and I are slowly restoring a 1987 car.

Let's build something useful.

kakbr800@gmail.com

Kampala, UgandaA CV, if you need the formal version

President Museveni shakes hands with Akbr Kanyesigye, a young man in a navy blazer, as other taskforce members look on
President Museveni talks to Akbr Kanyesigye at the launch, as ICT Minister Frank Tumwebaze looks on. April 2019. Photo: Ministry of ICT and National Guidance.

The 4th Industrial Revolution Taskforce

April 2019 to January 2021

In April 2019 President Museveni set up a 21-member expert taskforce to study the technologies of the fourth industrial revolution and advise the government on how Uganda should adopt them. Former ICT minister John Nasasira chaired it.

I joined from the Ministry of ICT's Government Citizen Interaction Centre, a few months after finishing university, and met the President with the rest of the team when he launched it.

Over the next eighteen months we studied how other countries were preparing, and wrote the report that became Uganda's national 4IR strategy. It sets out how Uganda can become a 4IR hub by 2040. The draft went public in October 2020, and the final report reached the Prime Minister in December 2022.

Read the appointment on the Ministry of ICT site
UBOS staff in military fatigues, with instructors and officials, in front of the National Leadership Institute building under three flags
UBOS staff at the National Leadership Institute, Kyankwanzi, July 2026. Courtesy photo, via New Vision.

Kyankwanzi, 2026

Political Education, Transformative and Leadership Development Course. National Leadership Institute, Kyankwanzi. Completed 30 July 2026.

A residential course about loving and serving your country. The lectures covered Uganda's history since before colonial rule, and what patriotism asks of a public servant. We also sang in Kiswahili and marched in formation.

The other half was military. We started early with drill and physical training, and spent time on the range learning to handle and shoot a rifle.

My syndicate's closing paper looked at what digital media and AI mean for Uganda. It weighed online services and census tablets against deepfakes and the 2024 breach at the Bank of Uganda.

Along the way I built my classmates a small offline revision site. It had mock exams, and a songbook so we could learn the Kiswahili songs.

See the paper See it under education

UBOS Innovation Award

Uganda Bureau of Statistics, 2025

The Bureau gave me its innovation award for 2025, for the dissemination portal and for Sanyu. The portal put the 2024 census results online down to parish level, and Sanyu answers questions from those figures and cites each one.

About Sanyu About the portal

Employee of the year

Uganda Bureau of Statistics, 2024

The Bureau's appraisal for the 2024 National Population and Housing Census ranked me its best-performing staff member. I worked on nearly every stage of the census that year.

  • Recruitment. I was the primary developer of the e-recruitment and field staff system, which managed more than 200,000 census personnel.
  • Maps. I wrote Python and QGIS scripts that helped the GIS team prepare maps faster.
  • Enumeration. I restructured the data collection tool the enumerators used on their tablets so it ran faster, which helped us start counting sooner.
  • Processing. I automated parts of the data processing in Python and helped bring AI into coding the answers, which saved months of manual work.

About the census system The full role
The AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner badge

AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner

Amazon Web Services. Issued September 2025, valid until September 2028.

The certificate shows a working knowledge of AWS: what its core services do, and which ones a project needs.

I use it every day, because I set up and run the Bureau's servers on AWS and GCP.

Verify it on Credly
An excerpt from Makerere University's first-class list: under Bachelor of Information Systems, KANYESIGYE Akbr, 4.47, First Class Honours
From the Academic Registrar's list of first-class degrees for the 69th graduation.

First Class, Makerere, 2019

BSc Information Systems. 69th graduation ceremony, January 2019.

Makerere's 69th graduation ran from 15 to 18 January 2019. Of 13,333 graduates, 368 earned first-class degrees. The Academic Registrar's list has me as the one first class in Information Systems that year, with a CGPA of 4.47 out of 5.

The full list (PDF) Makerere's announcement
The Huduma Fellowship logo

Huduma Fellow, class of 2026

LéO Africa Institute and Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung

Huduma is Swahili for service. The fellowship is a leadership programme for people who serve in Uganda's public and civic sectors, and each class takes in 15 fellows.

Fellows meet for seminars and workshops, and go back to their jobs in between to put the ideas to work, with mentors along the way. I joined the 2026 class from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics.

Akbr Kanyesigye's portrait from the Huduma Fellows list

Akbr KanyesigyeIT Officer, Uganda Bureau of StatisticsAs listed among the Huduma Fellows

See the fellows