Digital and Technology Cluster Lead

Dr Caroline Khene is a Research Fellow and Leader of the Digital and Technology Cluster. Her work focuses on developing and facilitating an enabling environment for digital citizen engagement and ‘trust’ in civic tech through strategy formulation, responsible innovation, and user experience (UX) design.

Caroline’s professional experience is in research and learning in the field of information systems. Caroline’s research generally focuses on ICT4D (digital development), with a specialisation in digital citizen engagement or civic technology. Caroline applies this in both south and north contexts, working with marginalised voices and using a practice-based approach to research.

Over the past 16 years, Caroline has been involved in a variety of funded research projects, including the Siyakhula Living Lab, Sunday River Valley Municipality Water Project, ICT4RED (ICT for Rural Education) project by the Meraka Institute, MobiSAM (Mobile Social Accountability Monitoring), as well as the MobiSAfAIDS project – where Caroline is the director.

Caroline led the implementation of the MobiSAfAIDS project in six (6) Southern African countries (South Africa, Eswatini, Lesotho, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and Malawi) to advocate for youth access to sexual reproductive health services and health facilities by the youth. Building on this local government civic tech work, Caroline has also worked with the South African National Treasury and the Civil Society Coalition for Open Budgets (called Imali Yethu) to advise on the implementation of an Open Budget Portal named ‘VulekaMali.’