Building what people's livelihoods depend on.

I was born in Lari, in Kiambu County, but I grew up in Kibera, where I spent most of my school years all the way through my master's. I was the first in my family to go to university. My mother would pay for me to study at the Kenya National Library, and on the walk there I found my way into the iHub in its early days. That room, full of people building things, is where I decided to choose Computer Science over Law. I went on to a First Class Honours degree at the University of Eldoret and an MSc at Strathmore University on a full Safaricom Academy scholarship.

At university my classmates started calling me Dean. It came from the revision sessions, the way I could take a complex subject apart and help everyone make sense of it. The name stuck, and so did the habit: I still get the most satisfaction from untangling something hard and making it usable for the people around me.

I am the founder and CTO of Attallah, the holding company behind Deadan Group and a family of products built for both ends of the economy: dPOS for small shops and agrovets, HimaHR for organisations managing thousands of staff, Salami for payments, and Votrack for transparent elections. They started here in Kenya and are now used in more than 10 African countries.

I go looking for challenges. The harder and more tangled the problem, the more I want to be in it. But I hold the work to two simple tests: build things that people will actually use, and do work that means something. If it fails either test, it isn't worth building.

I chair the Kabete Volleyball Team, an unpaid role I was elected and re-elected to. We use the game to bring young people together, teach them how to manage money, and keep them away from drugs and alcohol.

Small businesses are the backbone of our economy. Kenya's seven million SMEs employ around fifteen million people, and most of them are underserved by the tools they need to grow. The same is true across the continent, which is why I start at home and keep expanding outward. My job, in business and in the community, is the same: make the thing work for the people who depend on it.