Kenya ICT Practitioners bill 2020 goes against ease of doing business in Kenya

The Kenyan innovation eco system comprising various stakeholders including but not limited to government, Civil society organisations, multilaterals, corporates, incubators, academia, investors, entrepreneurs and innovators has matured over the last decade evidenced by.

• Ranked 85^th globally and 3^rd in Africa in the 2021 Global Innovation Index (GII).
• Kenya ranked top 3 in Africa in the Global Startup Ecosystem Index (GSEI)
• Kenya ranked 4^th in attracting venture capital funding in Africa (Partech 2021)
• Kenya ranked 5^th globally in 2021 crypto adoption index

Further, several global tech giants have set up in Kenya such as Google (Africa Product Development Centre (ADC)), Microsoft and Amazon (cloud service), VISA (Visa opened an innovation studio in Nairobi aimed at co-developing digital payments and commerce solutions), and Swiss non-profit, NEAR (partnership with local blockchain community, Sankore to launch a regional hub in Kenya dedicated to blockchain innovation, education, and talent development in Africa) among others.

ICT sector which is part of the broader innovation ecosystem has grown in leaps and bounds contributing directly to Kenya’s gross domestic product GDP (KSh 387.2 billion in 2018 and KSh 427.0 billion in 2019.) as well as supporting other sectors both in public as well as private sector.  From a labour perspective the sector accounted for 6 percent of private sector wages.

Kenya’s labour market is expected to have an additional 9 million people by 2025 (World Bank 2012) meaning between 2015-2025, the country should be creating on average 900,000 jobs annually. Whilst Kenya is creating new jobs (846.3 thousand 2019) a big portion (over 80 percent) is within the informal where there remain challenges of sustainability of jobs as well as level of wages.

The disruption to the economy over the last 5 years including protracted electioneering in 2017-2018, interest rate cap, drought, pending bills to private sector, Covid 19, high levels of corruption combined with fiscal indiscipline by government of Kenya and the recent war in Ukraine affecting oil and fertilizer prices have compounded the already dire economic situation and further entrench poverty (currently over 30 percent) and unemployment.

Kenya just like other nations proposed strategies to help the economy recover as espoused in budget policy statement 2020,2021 and 2022 under economic recovery strategy. Further over the last decade the government of Kenya has made significant strides in easing the business climate for private sector players through policy and legislative reforms as evidenced by the various business laws (amendment) acts which have tackled issues such as automation of government processes such as company registration, taxation etc, land transaction reforms, small dispute resolution mechanism among others. The overall objective being to attract foreign direct investment as well as spur significant growth of SMEs.

The recent approval by Kenya’s national assembly of the ICT practitioners bill whose objectives is to establish a legal framework for training, licensing, practices and standards for all ICT professionals in Kenya goes against global best practice as well as Kenya’s ease of doing business. There is no empirical evidence linking how the bill will either address non or sub optimal performance of the ICT sector as well as broader innovation sector by addressing the parameters to leading indices such as global innovation index, global start-up index among others.

Viffa being among the Kenya ICT ecosystem stakeholders (KIES) hold the position that the bill must be rejected.

Finally, from an innovation perspective, it’s with considering fast-tracking and passage of the start-up bill currently in National assembly having gone through 1^st reading as legislation to support the start-up ecosystem in Kenya.