This journey has culminated in an unexpected place: Lagos, Nigeria, where Kates is now building essential, free civic technology tools. Her biggest hurdle, however, is not technical. It is the persistent need to convince the Nigerian public that she is not, in fact, trying to scam them.
Following the Problem to the Source
Kates, who studied environmental engineering at Georgia Tech, initially wanted to solve tangible problems like cleaning sewage. But her experience in engineering consulting proved frustrating. As an engineer, she was simply "executing on someone else’s vision," confined to addressing problems that had already been prioritized. She questioned the urban planning and policy decisions that were made before the engineers ever got involved.
Her quest for greater influence led her to graduate school to study urban planning and policy in New York City, where she spent four years with the city government’s digital innovation team. There, she encountered a new set of problems: the agonizingly slow pace of government, and the pervasive issue of decisions being made based on "gut feelings, rather than real data." Furthermore, policies were often rolled out without any mechanism to study their actual impact.
Driven by this frustration, Kates taught herself to code years after college, viewing technology purely as a necessary tool. “It feels more tangible to be able to produce a data analysis or piece of software rather than just having conversations for years,” she explains. Code became the fastest way to solve the upstream problems of data scarcity and inefficiency.
The Spreadsheet Decision: Why Lagos?
In 2021, Kates and her husband made the decision to move to Nigeria. As an "engineering couple," they made their choice using a spreadsheet ranking system. Lagos stood out due to several factors: its status as the biggest city in Africa’s most populous country, a big and appealing tech ecosystem, manageable time zone differences, and a cultural directness they felt was similar to Americans. Crucially, the prevalence of English was a major advantage, having experienced the limitations of language barriers while working in Vietnam.
Now living in Lagos for over four years, Kates was immediately struck by a solvable infrastructure gap: underutilized waterways and a lack of public information about them.
The potential time savings are enormous—a trip that can take three hours by road can take as little as twenty to forty minutes by ferry. Yet, Kates was surprised that many Lagosians "never even think about the ferries," due to a lack of awareness and inaccurate information.
The Lagos Ferry Map: Building Trust Through Action
To address this information gap, Kates and her team at Public Tech Studio are building the Lagos Ferry Map. The work involves data analysts and field contractors who collect information on the ground.
Getting this data is often challenging. Contractors face resistance at terminals, and Kates discovered that almost all ferries, including government-operated ones, adhere to a 'fluid schedule'—they wait until the boat fills up before departing, which limits public reliability. She also noted the huge missed opportunity of limited ferry service on the densely populated mainland.
Building the technology, she discovered, was the easy part. The truly difficult aspect was navigating the deep-seated public distrust of anyone offering something for free.
“When people hear that I’m volunteering my team’s time to work on some of these issues... I definitely get met with skepticism,” Kates says. “People just always assume that you’re only going to do something if you’re going to make money from it.”
This pervasive suspicion was her greatest culture shock, a problem she attributes partly to the lack of a strong philanthropic culture that can afford to fund passion projects, unlike in the US. Her solution is simple: show sincerity through action. Progress, even on a small team, builds the essential trust needed for wider acceptance and government partnerships.
From Data to Insight: The Future of Civic Tech
Kates refined her philosophy on "open data" during her time at Stears, a data and intelligence publication in Lagos. She argues that merely making data available isn’t enough; the data must be visualized and intuitive to extract important insights easily.
Now leading Public Tech Studio, Kates’s work is moving beyond the ferry map to provide a holistic view of all public transportation services to help assess and plan for connectivity gaps.
The project she is most excited about, however, is the most fundamental: population estimates.
“No one knows how many people actually live here,” she says, stressing how crucial this information is for both the public and private sectors. Public Tech Studio plans to clean, validate, and aggregate multiple existing population estimates to create simple, accessible versions for public use—a classic example of the upstream, unglamorous problem-solving she champions.
Looking forward, Kates is cautiously optimistic. She is concerned about the impact of AI on job opportunities for junior tech talent, but she believes AI will be a boon for civic tech, allowing cash-strapped non-profits to build tech solutions more inexpensively.
Her long-term focus remains grounded: pace herself, focus on sincerity, and use technology to make cities work better for their residents.