Michael Katagaya

Michael Richard Katagaya is a governance practitioner and social entrepreneur whose work sits at the intersection of democracy, social justice, technology, and livelihoods. As Co-Founder and Team Leader of Evidence and Methods Lab (EML), a Ugandan civil society organisation that has implemented projects across the continent, he has spent nearly a decade building the civic infrastructure that connects citizens to the decisions made in their name — tools that open up public spending and government information to ordinary people, carry citizen feedback to those in office, and measure whether anyone answers. Much of this work concerns public service delivery: where it fails, why, and what it takes to make institutions respond to the people they serve. That body of work has reached more than five million citizens across a number of African countries.

His research at the Institute for the Study of Human Rights asks how human rights frameworks should respond as democratic life moves onto digital infrastructure — infrastructure that is increasingly the site of deliberate state intervention. Drawing on EML’s monitoring and survey work in Uganda and comparative cases across the continent, he examines state-directed digital suppression as a violation of the right to political participation under Article 25 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), and is developing a documentation framework designed to give these violations the same evidentiary rigour long applied to physical ones. His wider interest is in the conditions under which digital civic infrastructure enables or forecloses participation, extending beyond elections to how citizens access services, shape policy, and hold institutions to account between electoral cycles, and to what accountability is owed them when that infrastructure is withdrawn.

That work rests on a career in evidence and public administration, built inside government and across regional civil society - among them Uganda’s Office of the Prime Minister, where he supported the DFID-funded Strengthening Evidence-Based Decision-Making programme across ministries and districts, and Twaweza East Africa, where he designed the monitoring and learning systems behind citizen engagement and education programmes reaching millions in the region. He is also Co-Founder of Makanika Dot Com, a social enterprise creating livelihoods, training and market access for mechanics and garage owners in Uganda’s automotive sector.

Michael is a Ford Global Fellow and completed the 2025–2026 Obama Foundation Scholars Programme at Columbia University. Earlier recognition includes the HiiL Justice Innovation Challenge in Uganda and a place at the Innovating Justice Forum in The Hague, selection as a UNESCO SDG Innovator through the UNLEASH Global Innovation Lab, and a Top 40 Under 40 profile by New Vision, a leading Ugandan daily. He serves on the board of the Agora Center for Research, and is a charter member of the Mastercard Foundation’s Young Africa Works Youth Advisory Group. He holds an MA in Social Sector Planning and Management and a BA in Adult and Community Education from Makerere University, Kampala.