The Partnership
The name says everything. One founder who came to Africa and never left in spirit. One who has always been there. Together, they align.
Ria Pullin
Founder and Co-CEO
San Francisco Bay Area
I build systems that make people visible.
Ria Pullin spent more than two decades on both sides of the fashion and entertainment world: as a model and actor in global campaigns, and as a storyteller who learned early which voices the industry routinely leaves out. Those years gave her an understanding of what makes a story travel and, more importantly, whose stories deserve to be told.
Her work in East Africa changed the frame entirely. She did not go to produce a campaign. She went to listen: to mothers, makers, and movement-builders who had spent lifetimes creating things the world would wear without ever knowing their names. That experience built the conviction behind Align with Africa and the infrastructure behind Trace Every Thread.
At Align, Ria partners exclusively with local filmmakers and storytellers so the people who make each piece are the ones who tell its story. The content belongs to them. The credit belongs to them. The technology exists to make that visible, verifiable, and permanent.
She is a first-generation Filipina-American who grew up across five countries, shaped by a life at the intersection of cultures and by the understanding that visibility is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a person's story mattering or not.
The name Align with Africa is also her own story. She came. She listened. She built something that makes that alignment structural.
Dora Achieng' Okeyo
Co-Founder and Co-CEO
Nairobi, Kenya
Real change starts at the community level.
Dora Achieng' Okeyo has spent over a decade designing and delivering livelihood programs across Africa. She has reached more than 6,600 young people through entrepreneurship bootcamps that embed gender-responsive practices from the ground up, led program management across Makueni and Kitui Counties, and built the kind of relationships with community leaders, government officials, and artisan cooperatives that take years and cannot be replicated.
Her professional philosophy is simple and hard-won: listening is just as crucial as leading.
As Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Align with Africa, Dora leads every artisan partnership and serves as the embedded field presence that makes every Align piece possible. She is the reason the relationships are real. Her decade of on-the-ground community ties across East Africa are the foundation beneath the brand, not a credential on a slide, but the actual reason this works.
She is based in Nairobi, where she is always in the market, always in the community, and always close to the next maker whose story the world needs to know.