Digital economy blueprint

5.6.5 Enabling Utilities

Building enabling physical infrastructure is crucial 

in supporting the rollout and sustainability of a dig-

ital economy. A good road network, reliable energy 

and water, will be crucial to support Kenya’s digital 

economy. Kenya has made changes to improve the re-

liability of power supply. Major upgrades have been 

made to the network infrastructure resulting in a nota-

ble reduction in the duration of outages. 

However, to maintain high-power computing infra-

structure and data centers that require un-interrupted 

energy source, Kenya will need well-targeted invest-

ments that are able to support the digital economy 

need for energy. Kenya has so far invested green ener-

gy sources such as hydro, wind and geothermal which 

will significantly lower the cost of running some of 

these facilities such as Data Centers, given that power 

is the single most expensive component of running a 

data center. Kenya is also exploring locating large en-

ergy consuming projects eg, data center sources that 

power the digital economy closer to the generation 

points hence reducing the cost of transmission.  

Given the recent heavy investment in road, railway 

and pipeline infrastructure in the country, it should be 

mandatory for the builders of these critical installa-

tions to ensure that they make provision for space for 

Telecommunications infrastructure. This will ensure 

easy reach of broadband, and by extension, ICT ser-

vices to the current underserved parts of the country. 

This could also serve as a redundancy measure with-

out expensive investment by service providers which 

will then reflect in the consumer prices.