Africa's Regulatory Failure Is Not a Law Problem

Kenya's civil society compliance gap is not a story about organisations evading registration. It is a story about a registration system designed for organisations with lawyers — and what changes when the infrastructure to navigate it finally exists.

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.