c. Use of the Equalization Fund to fund ICT projects in marginalized counties from 2014/2015. d. Use the National Research Fund (2% GDP) or other Government Supported Venture Capital Fund to finance and commercialize ICT innovations. e. Provision of risk guarantees for micro and small businesses through a statutory prescribed agency. f. Consolidate all Ministries’ ICT budgets by 2015/2016 for ICT projects only. ‘The Government shall fund the foundational pillars through a re-focused expenditure planning model’ 2. Private Sector: Development of suitable incentives and tax breaks to private sector both within and outside the ICT sector to fund the Master Plan projects. Global Venture Capital and Angel organizations will be encouraged to set up business in the country. The incentives may include; Development of Special Purpose Vehicles/Private Sector Consortiums and waivers on certain levies, licensing fees, tax incentives and tax breaks. 3. Development Partners: Kenya will leverage on our funding priorities when approaching development partners who have ICT at the top of their support priority lists to meet the costs of ICT related expenditure. 4. Capital markets: This needs to be developed to support the issuance of relevant instruments (such as ICT infrastructure bonds), which are considered to have investment grade credit rating. The National Broadband Strategy recommends KES 70 billion broadband infrastructure bond to fund broadband strategy implementation. 5. Small Business Administration Agency: Working with the commercial banking sector through existing channels to develop appropriate modalities to get potential innovations commercialized. The Small Business Administration Agency will provide Government guarantee to the commercial banks to facilitate financing of ICT innovations by 2015/2016. ICT Budget Domains Essentially there will be three levels at which ICT budgets will be domiciled. ..98 .................................................................................................................Towards ...............a...Digital .............Kenya ............ a) Centralized sourcing and view of all shared services items. These should be under the ICT Authority. In return, ICT Authority will be required to provide clear SLAs to all the entities consuming the services. These include: Communications connectivity (LANs, WANs, Backbone links (fibre, wireless), etc.); Data Centres and Servers; Software Licenses (such as Oracle, Microsoft, DMS, etc.); and Computing Devices (at a later stage to leverage on economies of scale and framework contracting). The budgets for these items should be held solely at the line Ministry (MoICT). b) For specific ‘business’ systems in the different Ministries, the functional aspects of the system will belong to the Ministry. I C T Authority will work with the specific Ministry to deliver the required functionality to ensure seamless integration and interoperability. Nevertheless the common items such as the Data Centre, Database platforms etc, will leverage on the shared services and will be provisioned accordingly. The budgets for the specific functional systems will remain with the Ministries who will work closely with the ICT Authority (as per the Governance stipulated in section 6.2). c) For the common use items such as desktops, consumables, etc, these budgets will be left with the Ministries. Guidelines & standards will be used to streamline all these procurements. Use of framework contracting will be introduced to ease and streamline this component as well. ‘Development of suitable incentives and tax breaks to private sector both within and outside the ICT sector to fund the Master Plan projects’ The Inter-Ministerial Committee (see section 6.2) will have a view of all the budgets and their application. 6.2 Institutional Framework The ICT State Department and the ICT Authority will work with National Government, County Governments and other departments and agencies to manage the various actions and initiatives in this ICT Master Plan. This section spells out how the structure within the ICT Authority will ensure implementation of the Master Plan and how this structure will relate with the key sectors of the economy as well as the 99 Towards a Digital Kenya ..............................................................................................................................................................