Steve Muiga

I am currently a fellow with the Open Hands Initiative, a global programme connecting young leaders across cultures for structured dialogue on pressing global issues. My cohort is working through a six-week curriculum on AI ethics, examining how artificial intelligence is reshaping society and what responsible development looks like when you have people from ten different countries in the same conversation. The programme has sharpened how I think about technology's role in society and introduced me to peers whose perspectives I would not have encountered otherwise.

I co-founded Origin in late 2025 alongside a small team, with the goal of building software products that create real value for businesses across Kenya. In the early stages, I conducted market research and spoke directly with businesses in Nakuru and surrounding areas, identifying problems worth solving and understanding what those businesses actually needed from technology. From those conversations I moved into building: I created tools tailored to their workflows, led content creation for our public presence including the website, and explored design as part of shipping products people could actually use. These experiences taught me as much about listening and iterating as they did about engineering, and they continue to shape how I build at Origin today.

In 2026, our team entered the E4C AI Pilot Competition, competing against 33 teams from around the world. We built E4CInsights, an AI pipeline synthesising policy briefs from World Bank, WHO, and E4C datasets to surface actionable insights for global development practitioners. We placed first overall and won a $2,500 prize. The win was meaningful, but the more lasting lesson was what you can build when you start with a clear problem and a focused team.

At KIFWA I am building a multi-tenant platform serving clearing agents, insurers, and freight service providers. The system handles bond purchases, renewals, and indemnity verification for over 2,000 clearing agents and integrates across multiple stakeholder types under one roof. The work involves optimised APIs and architecture decisions I have refined through time spent directly with the operations team understanding what they actually needed. Working on a system this operationally critical has sharpened how I approach reliability and scale.

Three months at Pacaya building and optimizing frontend features in a Next.js application serving over 3,000 monthly users. The work was component architecture, UI performance, and improving the overall reliability of the frontend experience. Good, focused engineering work.

Built an IoT-connected application consuming hundreds of daily sensor events for real-time monitoring. I delivered responsive UI components that reduced dashboard navigation time by 30% and integrated backend APIs resulting in 20% fewer data syncing failures across IoT devices. Working with live sensor data gave me a strong appreciation for how much engineering precision matters when hardware and software have to agree in real time.

Contributed to the avionics systems of the N-3 rocket as part of the Nakuja Project, a collaboration between JICA and JKUAT. The work covered PCB fabrication, parachute ejection mechanism development, and iterative recovery subsystem testing. The rocket achieved successful subscale system tests. Contributing to a rocketry project as a software person taught me to think carefully about what failure means when the stakes are physical.

Improved website performance and SEO for Infiscope, increasing organic traffic by 40% in one month and boosting on-site engagement by 25% through UI enhancements and better product presentation.

Supported an HR system used by over 100 staff members and built a library management system with book reservation, borrowing, and automated return-notification features that cut manual tracking work by 60%. I also maintained the live-streaming infrastructure for parliamentary proceedings, keeping session uptime at 99%. Working inside a government institution for the first time showed me how much operational reliability matters in environments where there is no fallback.