5.2 ICT as a Driver of Industry In order to strengthen Kenya’s global position as one of the best environments for businesses and to anchor more businesses, the Master Plan proposes a focus on seamless E-Government services for citizens, businesses and investors that includes a citizen portal and a business/investor portal. ‘The Master Plan is based on the principle of inclusion and equitable distribution of services’ Strategy S3: Promote e-Government as the service channel of choice. The Government has embarked on rolling out service delivery centres with dedicated service staff in the County Governments in the form of Huduma centres to reach those without internet access from home or need help to transact electronically. Likewise, statistics indicate a high mobile phone penetration rate in the country. The Master Plan proposes creative exploitation of these facts to improve effective delivery of government services. This will be achieved by adopting IT enabled services (ITES) customer support perspective to support eservice delivery in GoK. To achieve this, an elaborate staff development programme to transform staff to new IT enabled service roles is needed. In this regard, GoK seeks to transform 10,000 public servants to customer contact agents over the plan period; and adopt technology use trends in customer relationship management under a public private partnership model. Youth, gender and vulnerable groups The Constitution of Kenya recognizes inclusion of all citizens when providing services and mitigating access to services to the youth, gender and vulnerable groups. In relation to the ICT Master Plan, we recognize that the most pressing needs for this category of citizens are access to ICTs at affordable costs and low ICT literacy levels. The Master Plan is based on the principle of inclusion and equitable distribution of services. An overall overriding objective is to provide community based access to ICT infrastructure, use of the Universal Service Fund to bridge the ‘digital divide’ and develop infrastructure and skills in identified regions that are adversely affected. 5.2.1 Setting the Context The focus of ICT as a driver of industry is to transform the key Vision 2030 economic sectors to enhance their growth, productivity and global competitiveness with special emphasis on SME’s. The current Kenya GDP is US$ 40.70b, which could go higher if SMEs in the various economic sectors driven by ICT can improve their systems and processes through use of technology. The current challenges in using ICT to achieve significant impact on the GDP include: a) Domination by a small number of favoured local and foreign companies offering ICT solutions to Government and various businesses; b) Organizations in various economic sectors find it difficult to appropriately use ICT in the business value chain due to inadequate capacity to perform or scale up ICT operations; c) Inadequate process maturity across the various economic sectors where there is lack of best practice, standards and discipline in use of ICT in the value chain; d) Limited understanding of the implications of Service Level Agreements (SLAs) to activities of various economic sectors; and e) A large percentage of informal activities in most economic sectors that are not easily traced and accounted for. With ICT as a driver of industry, it is expected that trade will be an outcome of the ICT adoption in the value chain of the various economic sectors arising from the enhanced efficiency and service delivery in the value chain. Energy is one of the key enablers of ICT and has a significant impact on the ability to achieve efficiency in all the sectors. ICT facilitates the various sectors of the economy resulting to increased knowledge on how the sectors can be improved. ‘Energy is one of the key enablers of ICT and has a significant impact on the ability to achieve efficiency in all the sectors.’ In order to achieve the Vision 2030 objective of driving knowledge economy, the availability, accessibility and affordability of energy to drive the ICT systems is important. Without stable power supply to ..74 .................................................................................................................Towards ...............a...Digital .............Kenya ............ 75 Towards a Digital Kenya ..............................................................................................................................................................