provide work and maker spaces for the local
community. Each innovation hub may be
associated with a nearby university or
technical vocational education and training
institution (TVET) and provide an
opportunity for the community to access
knowledge, create local solutions to
problems, explore with expert guidance
improvements to traditional solutions and
enter the enterprise pipeline to mass
production.
6. Competitions: To provide an avenue to
showcase locally developed ICT products,
the Ministry of ICT will hold annual county
and national ICT shows where locally
developed products can be showcased, the
shows will provide a platform for
developers to meet industry and financial
partners.
Entrepreneurship: The nature of
enterprise is changing rapidly, and the
traditional format of corporation, established
over 400 years ago of multidivisional functional
silos with ownership and management
separated, is being superseded by new shapes
of organisation based on fluid highly
networked, asset light, sharing economy forms.
It is our assessment that organisations that
span the entire supply chain with a vast array
of products are harder to create and have
doubtful viability in our environment we posit
as policy assumption that small, agile, highly
specialised companies seamlessly integrating
into a product or service delivery pipeline of
global scale are going to gain in prevalence. The
top of the food chain will be organisations in a
coordination or platform role the service
aggregators and arbitrators as it were. In light
of this assessment, the Government has
encouraged the formation of small companies;
agencies such as the Youth Fund and others
provide small loans for the establishment and
support of small and micro enterprises by the
youth.
The
public
sector
ICT
business
environment is almost by definition geared
against the majority of local companies,
precisely because the procurement rules and
risk minimisation strategy of most government
procurement processes favour the award of
contracts and tenders to already large and
successful companies. This creates an
unfortunate chicken and egg scenario where
government wants to encourage the emergence
and growth of Kenyan enterprise, but precisely
because of the perceived risk does not give
Ministry of ICT, Kenya
Kenyan enterprises a fair turn at the wheel. The
Access
to
Government
Procurement
Opportunities (AGPO) presidential directive
seeks to ameliorate this unfortunate feedback
loop by guaranteeing that 30% of government
business goes to youth and PWD-owned
businesses.
This policy specifically encourages new
business models and service delivery
paradigms built around freelancing, onlinework and opportunity swarming. An example
of such a model (in no way prescriptive) would
be a consortium of individual workers that
form an ad-hoc company around a specific
government or service delivery opportunity
and share risks and profits, then disband on
completion. A subset of whose members
subsequently or concurrently join yet another
opportunity focused organisation built just in
time. These fluid, swarming organisations are
an expected element of the future
entrepreneurial
environment,
and
are
specifically encouraged. The enactment of the
Companies Act of 2015 provides wide latitude
in the nature and shape of Kenyan
corporations.
It is the aim of this policy to ensure that in
the next 5 years, there are new firms:
1. 20 Kenyan Multi-national ICT Companies
2. 300 Mid-sized Companies
3. 5000 Small and Medium Enterprises
4. 20,000 Start-ups
This policy provides that:
Contract swarming: Government ICT
procurement will consider awards of tenders to
new and innovative organisational forms to
permit greater participation by emerging
enterprises, and adopt home grown solutions.
Buying Kenyan: In every instance where
there is a Kenyan solution that meets up to 70%
of stated requirements, the Kenyan built
solution will be accepted in preference to any
other solution from anywhere else. In a
selection between Kenyan built solutions the
usual beauty-contest evaluation criteria will be
used. In government defined priority areas, a
50% solution will be accepted in order to grow
Kenyan capacity in those areas.
Start-up ecosystem: Kenya has a healthy
and growing start-up ecosystem centred on
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