To me, technology isn’t just about code or data; it’s a tool for connection. It’s about building systems that solve real problems for the people who actually have to use them.
I learned this early on in environmental science and GIS, the art of mapping where a city’s pipes, clinics, and communities really are. While working for a county government in Maryland, I’d take trips home to Addis Ababa and hit a constant roadblock: getting anywhere meant relying on word of mouth. Minibus taxis were the pulse of the city, yet there was no map, no official route guide, and no way to know the fair fare.
So, I set out to connect the dots. I started riding them.
Sululta, Burayu, Sebeta, Akaki, Summit: hub to hub, out to every edge of the city, logging routes on my phone.
That effort started as a simple digital map, but it opened up a much bigger question: If people are disconnected from basic route information, what else are they cut off from? Friends in Addis joined in, walking the streets with phones and GPS units. Together, we tagged over 50,000 locations by hand and mapped 800 buildings by name, while friends in the U.S. helped build the backend.
We called it eAdrasha, a way to use technology to bring a city closer together.
When people asked why we didn’t wait for global tech giants to map the area, the reason was clear: technology only works when it’s grounded in reality. They bought data from afar; we were standing in the street. When a local business moved or a road changed, we updated it that week.
Growing eAdrasha to 40 people and 25,000 users taught me what true problem-solving takes:
I’ve carried that philosophy into every system I’ve built since.
Whether working with water utilities, U.S. local governments, USAID programs across eight international missions, or serving as Senior Digital Health Advisor for USAID/Ethiopia (guiding a $63 million national health portfolio), my focus has remained the same. Beyond the budget lines and technical specs, the real work is sitting at the table with ministry officials, developers, donors, and health workers across 8,000 rural clinics, using technology to link them together so the solution outlasts the project.
At the end of the day, I build systems, but I design for people. I use technology to fill in the missing pieces so communities, institutions, and the data between them can finally connect.
My perspective was shaped by building systems from the ground up. Founding eAdrasha in Addis Ababa, a location-based start-up focused on mapping places that were often missing from conventional maps, reinforced an important lesson for me: technology works best when it reflects the realities of the people and institutions expected to use it.
I carried that same approach into my work at USAID/Ethiopia, where I served as Senior Digital Health Advisor and supported a $63 million national digital health portfolio. My role required working across government agencies, health care facilities, implementing partners, and development partners to strengthen the systems, governance, and coordination behind digital health investments.
More recently, I have advised public utilities on major infrastructure modernization programs, covering enterprise GIS, systems integration, and digital transformation strategy.
If you are working on systems that need to move from concept to sustainable implementation, let’s connect.
I enjoy working at the intersection of strategy, technology, and implementation.
Having managed donor-funded programs, advised public institutions and utilities, and built my own geospatial business, I have seen a consistent pattern: technology projects rarely struggle because of technology alone. They struggle when the solution does not fit the institution, the operating environment, or the people expected to use and sustain it.
That experience has taught me to ask practical questions early:
These questions may seem simple, but answering them well can save organizations significant time, money, and frustration.
My role is not simply to recommend or build technology. I work with teams to connect strategy, people, processes, data, and technology so that what gets implemented can actually be used, managed, and sustained.
That is the part of the work I find most rewarding: helping organizations move from having technology to having technology that genuinely works for them.
Things I Build
When something bothers me enough, I still write code for it. Same instinct as riding the taxis, smaller scale. These are public.
The record of every formally registered business in Ethiopia is public and close to unusable — a ninth of the records filed under “Other”, and a third of the country missing from the copy I started with.
An interactive explorer of 345,369 businesses, built on a repaired dataset that publishes aggregates only.
Ethiopia_Trade_Business_Data
Addis Ababa depends on the Gefersa Reservoir, and its water quality is hard to observe continuously from the ground.
A Google Earth Engine workflow that tracks reservoir conditions from satellite imagery.
Gefersa_Resv_Water_Quality_GEE
A city of millions with very little openly available spatial data to plan or build on.
OpenStreetMap extracts for Addis Ababa, published as GeoJSON for anyone to use.
Addis_Ababa_OSM
Geospatial capacity is the bottleneck in most institutions I work with, and classroom training rarely sticks.
An interactive web app that walks people through QGIS and PostGIS at their own pace.
QGIS_Training
GIS teams lose days to repetitive tasks that should run themselves.
A collection of Python utilities for automating routine work across Esri products.
esri_arcpy
Small property operations need real record-keeping but cannot justify enterprise systems.
A working management system built entirely on Google Apps Script.
GAS-Apartment-Management
My coloring book of Ethiopian heritage, landscapes and everyday life needed one place that shows the pages and says where to buy it.
A one-page site with sample pages and where to find the book, in Addis Ababa or on Amazon, published to GitHub Pages on every push.