Your NGO Is Illegal and That Is Not Your Fault

The PBO Act 2013 is better legislation than what it replaced in almost every respect. Registration rates did not meaningfully improve after it passed. The failure mode in African regulatory reform is almost never the quality of the law. It is the absence of the translation layer that makes the law navigable.

International donors' due diligence requirements are producing compliance pressure the Kenyan state has never consistently applied. The organisations that cannot meet them are increasingly the ones doing the most essential ground-level work. Nobody designed this outcome. Understanding it is the first step to addressing it.

The AI and law conversation is fixated on the hard problem — can AI reason about law? It has missed the tractable problem that is already solved: can AI read a document against a specific checklist and identify gaps? The answer is yes. This is what PBOMaster does, and what it finds.