I am the founder and executive director of Kabissa – Space for Change in Africa, a network of over 1000 African civil society organizations. I also am Senior Steward – IT of Global Action Networks-Net, whose mission is to strengthen the capacity of multi-sector, global networks to address urgent sustainability issues – social, economic, and environmental.

I started describing myself as an “Internet in Africa” guy early on, when I discovered that my love of Africa and keen interest in electronic communications could fit so neatly together in one career. My first Internet in Africa job, which I took in 1992 while still an undergraduate student in German and African Studies at Georgetown University, was to create and maintain a private “store and forward email network” for the USAID Famine Early Warning System Project, a project with more than a dozen field offices throughout the Sahel region of Africa collaborating on early warning bulletins. I went from there to providing consulting services to development projects for Africare, Volunteers in Technical Assistance and a number of other international agencies working in Africa. in the early 1990s I also helped my father, Peter Eigen, develop an e-mail communication network and Internet strategy for his fledgling organization which would become Transparency International, a powerful international anti-corruption movement. After a two-year stint at Oneworld.net from 1998-2000 and a particularly transformative IT consulting project I did with human rights organizations in Nigeria, I founded Kabissa in November 1999.

I hold a BS in German and African studies (1994) from Georgetown University and an MA in Culture, Race and Difference (1997) from the University of Sussex.

With my wife and two young children, I live too many time zones away from Africa (GMT -8!) on Bainbridge Island in Washington State, on the west coast of the United States.