About Bunge Bits

Bunge Bits is a civic-tech project that uses AI to generate human-readable summaries of Kenya’s National Assembly and Senate proceedings. The goal is to make parliamentary activity more accessible to all Kenyans, especially those who don’t have the time or capacity to sit through multi-hour livestreams.

How It Works

At the core of Bunge Bits is a fully automated pipeline that:

1. Periodically scrapes archived livestreams from the official Parliament of Kenya YouTube channel
2. Downloads and transcribes audio using OpenAI Whisper
3. Generates structured summaries with GPT-4o

Tech Stack

The system is written in Rust, with a Remix.js frontend and a PostgreSQL database. Cloud infra is containerized and runs on a self-hosted VPS.

Why This Project Matters

Kenya’s democracy thrives when citizens are informed. Yet most people are disconnected from the day-to-day workings of Parliament. Bunge Bits tries to bridge that gap, by making civic information simple, digestible, and shareable.

Future Direction

This project is just getting started. I plan to expand support for Swahili translations, integrate named-entity recognition to track bills and MPs, and build features for exploring trends over time via Hansard reports and historical summaries.

If you're a developer, designer, journalist, or researcher interested in civic tech, I’d love to collaborate and take this further.

Support the Project

Running this platform incurs real costs. API usage for Whisper and GPT-4o, cloud hosting, and database storage. If you’d like to help keep it alive and growing, your support would mean a lot. You can do so here: support-bungebits.c12i.xyz

Collins Muriuki | Contact: hello[at]c12i[dot]xyz