Consultations on the draft digital economy strategy paper for Kenya has been extended until 30th September 2020.
This is as the country moves to develop a strategy that will enable it to tap into the global digital economy and realize its full potential.
In a notice, the country’s Ministry of ICT, Innovation and Youth Affairs is inviting interested members of the public and private organizations to submit substantive comments to this draft strategy paper with specific proposals for amendments.
Available figures indicate that various ‘gig economy’ platforms have been expanding in, and into, Kenya, facilitating 677, 961 digital or online workers with thousands more engaging in digitally-enabled work, such as ride-hailing taxi drivers.
However, Kenya’s ICT sector goal to contribute over 10% to the country’s GDP remains unachieved as the sector has only been able to reach 2%.
The ICT Ministry attributes this to slow adoption of the use of digital services, underdevelopment of the ecosystem for the creation of local content, lack of access to broadband connectivity, and skills gaps, among others. The Government, private sector and the civil society have not fully adopted the use of digital services which can facilitate the development of local content that, in turn, trigger the growth of digital businesses.
The draft digital economy strategy paper recommends that the state should fully adopt digital technologies for convenient, transparent, efficient and secure public service delivery. It observes that the current digital ecosystem is not fully developed to support the production of local content and applications to build the required digital literacy to serve and attract demand for local users.
Globally, the volume of digital business, e-commerce and social media networks users is growing enormously, but Kenya is yet to achieve the development of adequate infrastructure and comprehensive policy and legal framework that fully support digital businesses are yet to be put in place.
The ICT skills and talent pool is yet to match the national requirement to drive the digital economy.
The draft policy document observes that institutions charged with the development of the digital economy need to be strengthened to coordinate and implement the programmes and projects for the digital economy.
According to the “Digital Economy Report 2019 – Value Creation and Capture: Implications for Developing Countries” by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), Africa and Latin America combined account for only 1% of the market capitalization value of the world’s digital platforms.
This is in spite of the fact that Africa remains one of the most populous continents in the world with a population of about 1.2 billion people.
This is in stark contrast to the United States and China which together, account for more than 50 per cent of global spending on Internet of Things (IoT), and more than 75 per cent of the world market for public cloud computing (UNCTAD, 2019).
Also, these countries account for 90 per cent of the market capitalization value of the world’s 70 largest digital platforms.
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