Background
The Institute of Public Finance (IPF) and New York University (NYU) are seeking a software developer individual or development firm, to build an intervention for its experiment on public participation in county budget formulation forums in select counties in Kenya. The study operates across 4–5 Kenyan counties and aims to test whether providing citizens with structured information and civic education tools, delivered via WhatsApp increases their engagement with Kenya’s constitutionally mandated public participation processes.
IPF is a Nairobi-based independent think tank working on public finance, budget transparency, and participatory governance. Public participation is among its core areas of work and seeks to build its own experience to build scalable solutions to improve public participation. This includes civic education curriculum
that seeks to impart knowledge on Public Financial Management (PFM) to university through its Bootcamp program.
IPF has also partnered with the Consul Democracy Foundation as local partner to lead the advocacy and deployment of its public participation software – the Consul Democracy. Therefore, the platform to be developed under this TOR may build upon, integrate with, or adapt elements of IPF’s existing tools, depending on the developer’s technical assessment of feasibility and efficiency. The platform serves as the primary delivery mechanism for the study’s intervention and must support multiple user configurations, content delivery schedules, automated tracking, and AI-assisted civic education features, all within the WhatsApp messaging environment. The study requires the platform to be operational for piloting
by the second week of July 2026 and fully deployed by late July 2026, ready for rollout in August 2026.
Objectives
The developer will design, build, test, and deploy a platform that enables IPF and the research team to:
- Deliver targeted informational package content (forum alerts, budget briefs and related forum agenda)
to registered users via WhatsApp - Deliver interactive civic education modules as structured, conversational WhatsApp lessons
- Provide an AI-assisted chatbot trained on civic education and public finance content that users can
query within WhatsApp - Support structured citizen input submission – issue prompts, guided preparation templates (a structured
WhatsApp-based preparation exercise that helps users formulate specific issues to raise at public
participation forums; see Configuration B, Section 3.2 for details) - Track user engagement and content interaction at the individual level.
- Deliver post-forum feedback summaries (as messages or pdf documents, content to be shared by IPF)
to a designated subset of users. - Support two distinct platform configurations (detailed in Section 3) that can be assigned to different user groups
Submission Details
Proposals should be submitted on or before 15th June 2026 to hr@ipfglobal.or.ke. Should you have any technical or logistical questions you can email them to the team via the same email.
