Sera Wazi is a civic information service that delivers government budgets, public projects and development funds to the people they belong to — by SMS, in local languages, on any phone. No internet. No smartphone. Just answers.
Every regional budget, every CDF allocation, every water project and school bursary is public record. But public records are written in English, buried in dense documents, and only accessible to those with smartphones and data connections.
Sera Wazi changes that. Send a text asking about any public fund or project in your area. A clear, plain-language answer comes back by SMS in seconds — in your own language, on any phone, whether you have internet or not.
SMS-based delivery means no smartphone, no data plan, no internet required. A basic feature phone is enough.
English, Kiswahili, Ekegusii, Turkana, Maa, and Samburu — reaching communities that governance has never directly spoken to.
Every answer is drawn from official government budgets and allocations — the same records that already exist, made accessible for the first time.
Three barriers stand between a citizen and information that is already, legally, theirs.
Regional budgets run to hundreds of pages of dense financial language. Even educated adults cannot extract what they need — let alone act on it.
Most civic technology assumes a smartphone and data connection. In rural and semi-arid Kenya, most citizens have neither. They are effectively locked out.
Government publishes in English and Kiswahili. Millions speak Ekegusii, Turkana, Maa, or Samburu as their first language. They are not spoken to directly.
Seliroko mobilises water to climate-vulnerable schools. The same parents who relied on our water work began arriving with a second question — about where school funds went, when boreholes would start, what happened to the CDF money. The answers were public. But nobody could find them.
We set up a dedicated number. Our team read the public records and replied in plain language — in Ekegusii, Kiswahili, Turkana, Maa, Samburu, or English. People trusted it because it was accurate and it spoke their language. The calls kept coming.
Sera Wazi has now answered over 1,500 questions across three regions. But demand continues to grow faster than a human team can handle. The next phase is full automation — so no one gets turned away.
Send a text asking about any public fund or project in your area. A clear, plain-language answer comes back by SMS in seconds — no internet or smartphone required.
A text or USSD query in any supported language about a budget, project, or public fund in their area.
The system finds the most relevant public record for the citizen's region and question.
The record is read and compressed to 160 characters — plain language, key facts only, no jargon.
The answer is rendered in the citizen's chosen language, including local languages with no prior civic technology.
Delivered as a standard text. Any phone. No internet. No app. No data plan. Just the answer.
A single piece of public information — the Nyamira school bursary — as it would arrive on six different phones.
Sera Wazi has answered over 1,500 questions across three regions of Kenya. Communities trust it, act on it, and come back for more.
"I had been trying to find out about the school bursary for two years. I texted Sera Wazi and had the answer in minutes. My daughter applied the next morning."
"We knew the water project money had been allocated. But nobody could tell us when the borehole would start. One text, and we finally had a date to hold people to."
"Getting this in Maa made the difference. When government speaks only English, it feels like it is not for us. Sera Wazi speaks our language."
Work through the steps below. The answer appears instantly — the same 160-character SMS that would arrive on any phone.
This prototype demonstrates the system in English. Today Sera Wazi is run by our team manually, serving 3 regions in Kenya in 6 languages, 4 of which are local. Our plan is to build full automation: AI-powered responses, local languages, SMS delivery at scale, no human bottleneck.
Sera Wazi works. Our team answers every question by hand — reading the record, writing the reply, sending the SMS. We have answered over 1,500 questions this way. But we are at our limit.
Demand is growing faster than our team can handle. Every week, people are turned away from information they have every right to. We are building the automation to change that.
A small Seliroko team reads public records and replies to citizens manually by phone and SMS — in six languages, across three regions. It works. But it is slow, and it cannot scale. The next phase is full automation.
Our Plan. Next Phase of Sera Wazi:
Seliroko has kept children in school for over 10 years by mobilising water to climate-vulnerable schools. Our mission is singular: no child misses school because of water shortage.
Sera Wazi grew from inside that work. The same parents who depend on our water programmes arrived asking about school fund allocations, borehole timelines, and public project progress. These questions were urgent. The answers were public. But nothing connected them to the people asking.
We did not set out to build a civic information platform. We set up a phone line to answer the questions we were already being asked. When that phone line could no longer keep pace with demand, Sera Wazi became the answer.
"Sera Wazi" — Open Policy. Governance that cannot be seen cannot be trusted. Citizens who cannot question their government cannot change it.