In Kenya, the growth of digital trade and digitally enabled transactions has been phenomenal, with digitization becoming an integral part of numerous day-to-day activities and service delivery. E-commerce is increasingly used by both government and private institutions and which ranks 89th glob ally and 7th in Africa in business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce readiness.
The proliferation of information and communications technology (ICT) services in Kenya provides opportunities to leverage business innovations to increase exports and imports through improvements in trade facilitation, enhance service delivery and improve access to information, all contributing to the ease of doing business for the general public and for international traders.
ICT connectivity to all the unserved and underserved corners of the country is a key prerequisite for transformation towards the realization of the Vision 2030 and the medium-term plans (MTPs). The importance of digitization of the Kenyan economy is expected to continue, especially since the country has recently developed and published a Digital Economy Blueprint (Republic of Kenya, 2019b).
Adoption of technology and the diffusion of digitization are key drivers of the growth of digital trade and of digitally enabled transactions in the country. At the global level, Kenya is a participant and a signatory to a number of international conventions and standards relating to ICT.
It is an active member of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) and the World Summit on the information society (WSIS). It is also spearheading issues of Internet Governance in the region, which is the development and application by governments, the private sector and civil society, in their respective roles, of shared principles, norms, rules, decision-making procedures, and programmes that shape the evolution and use of the Internet (WGIG, 2005).
“The Digital Infrastructure will enhance equitable access to national service through a pervasive and ubiquitous national ICT infrastructure,” noted Jerome Ochieng, PS Ministry of ICT. “We will endeavor to create an environment that enables stakeholder engagement, listening to feedback and making evidence-driven policy decisions. The Ministry will link the projects identified to other government of Kenya priority initiatives aimed at fast tracking the country’s digital transformation as expressed in Vision 2030.”
Kenya is active at the Internet Corporation for assigned names and (ICANN) headquartered in the United States which is responsible for the coordination of the global Internet’s systems of unique identifiers and ensuring it’s stable and secure operation. In addition, Kenya has been actively participating in the two UN processes, Group of Government Experts (GGE) discussions from 2004 and the UN Open Ended Working Group (OEWG) created in 2019 where deliberations related to the developments in the field of information and telecommunications in the context of international security have been going on.
Whereas the country’s global performance index with respect to the online service stands at 67.7% which ranks Kenya above the average performance for the whole of Africa and the world, its performance on Telecommunication infrastructure is still low at 34% compared to the average scores for Africa and the rest of the world. This presents opportunities for expansion on telecommunication infrastructure.
Globally and according to the UN eGovernment Annual Survey (2020), 66 percent of Member States provided online transactional services in 2020. Prevalence rates are highest in the very high and high OSI groups (93 and 81 per cent, respectively), covering the full spectrum of the 20 services assessed in 2020.
In the middle and low OSI groups, the respective prevalence rates are 53 and 13 per cent. It is important to note that progress in online services delivery is being made even in countries with low OSI levels, where the average number of online services offered rose from 1 in 2018 to around 3 in 2020.
The Author, Molly Wasonga, is a Digital Researcher with the Center for Advanced Internet Studies (CAIS), Germany, and a freelance tech writer. Talk to her on molly.wasonga@gmail.com
