Jenn’s Akuko Experience

What comes to your mind when you hear the word “akuko”? I thought it was a slang term for an animal in the streets of Africa ?. Actually, Akuko, which means “story” in Igbo, is a data analysis platform built by the hardworking team at Ona.

My experience with Akuko as a novice data nerd has been awesome. Signing up on the Akuko website was a breeze and perusing the preexisting sample posts showcasing vital information as colorful maps, charts, and tables were a great way to get started. Health data, global population data, and indices are brought to life on the platform.

I found Akuko easy to learn because it does not require coding to create stories and visualize data. The menu items on the interface are easy to follow and I quickly learned to connect different data sources such as Google Sheets. The posts menu is quite easy to understand and one is able to see a list of posts and spaces on the left menu.

Jenn’s Top Restaurants in Nairobi was the first post I created, which includes photos, menus, locations, and ratings of my favorite restaurants in Nairobi. Also, inspired by the shift to remote working during the Covid-19 pandemic, I created Tips for Smart Remote Working to help those having challenges balancing work and staying at home. Collaborating with others is something useful when creating my posts. It let me share my posts with others to add comments and content, which helped create better Akuko stories by including different opinions.

As I had mentioned earlier, signing up for an Akuko is easy and takes a few quick steps. From the Akuko homepage, simply click on the Sign up button at the top right corner. Once you are done with that process, you can log into your Akuko account and interact with the tool to create dashboards. The help documentation is a good place to start learning about features, how to navigate the tool, and about creating your first dashboard.