earn a good living by utilising the digital
infrastructure that the government is investing
in.
Rules: This policy requires carefully
crafted rules that ensure that there is fairness
in the market place, that transactions are
honoured, contracts and agreements are
enforced, and that that scarce national
resources such as spectrum and rights-of-way
are fairly allocated.
Things: For the Market to work efficiently
and provide a platform for sellers and buyers, it
needs infrastructure. It is our policy to
judiciously use public funds to build state-ofthe art infrastructure at the best possible price
and make it available to the largest possible
number of people.
6.2.2 Money
Money, technology and people are the
drivers of the digital economy. By mirroring the
physical entities used in business, such as bank
notes, land titles, certificates and so on with
digital equivalents, business can be assisted to
move much faster since it is no longer limited
by the time it physically takes to move a
business item from one geographic location to
another. We call the process of designing digital
equivalents
for
physical
things
“informatisation.”
Digitisation is the state where some thing,
state or process in the real world can be
completely simulated in the digital space – and
of course this requires maintenance of exactly
the same legal protections that exist in the
physical world. To speed up business and
accelerate prosperity, financial instruments,
including cash, must be fully “informatised” and
“digitised.”
The digital and sharing economies are
predicated on the legal recognition of digital
contracts for digital analogues.
Knowledge Economy: The Government
will enable the move from minimal value
economic activities such as the export of
unfinished, raw materials to higher value
economic activities such as manufacturing,
export of finished goods and a digital economy.
However, we recognise that high value
artefacts such as phones or cars require a
complex manufacturing ecosystem involving
many interrelated manufacturers, so for
instance, to create a computer it is necessary to
have metal forming, plastic extrusion,
integrated circuit design, silicon fabrication,
silicon packaging, specialty bonding materials,
microelectromechanical fabrication, circuit
Ministry of ICT, Kenya
layout, all the way up to operating system and
application software development and
hundreds of other specialty capabilities, each
most likely in a different firm. This ecosystem
of self-supporting and dependent industries
and technologies is referred as the techonomy
in this policy.
This policy is designed to move the Kenyan
ICT sector beyond mere trade in technological
items, system deployment and software
development. This move is intimately
connected to our country’s capacity to do
fundamental research in the physical sciences
and our capacity to discover, engineer, realise,
productise, and mass produce for global sale,
technological artefacts, systems and processes.
This will take time to achieve in full, but we
start now, as follows:
1. Set Biennial Research Priorities: Every
two years the Government will set five (5)
research priority areas and provide funding
to institutions of higher learning and private
enterprise in the form of research grants,
bonded scholarships, equipment purchase
grants
and
postgraduate
course
recommendations and certifications in the
priority areas.
2. Set Challenges: The government in
consultation will define challenges and
prizes in the priority areas. The solution to
the challenges will become the intellectual
property of the Government of Kenya, and
may be licensed to indigenous Kenyan
companies
for
productisation
and
manufacture.
3. Protect Intellectual Property: It is and will
continue to be the policy of the government
to provide robust protection and
enforcement
of
Kenyan-developed
intellectual property rights, and facilitate
the rapid and advantageous acquisition of
non-Kenyan intellectual property rights.
4. Provide Financial Incentives: Research
and fundamental knowledge generation in
Kenya has hitherto been the preserve of
government agencies and institutions of
higher learning. The Government believes
that it is time for the private sector to get in
on the act.
5. Innovation Hubs: The Government, in
partnership with other arms will assist in
the creation of innovation hubs across the
country. Initially there will be 290
constituency innovation hubs which
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