7th August, 2020 THE KENYA GAZETTE 3071 6. Require content producers for distribution and _ public consumption in Kenya to produce such content in accessible format; firm. This ecosystem of self-supporting and dependent industries and technologies is referred as the techonomy in this policy. 7. Ensure that websites of government departments and agencies comply with international web accessibility standards and are This policy is designed to move the Kenyan ICT sector beyond mere trade in technological items, system deployment and software development. This move is intimately connected to our country’s capacity to do fundamental research in the physical sciences and our capacity to discover, engineer, realise, productise, and mass produce for global sale, technological artefacts, systems and processes. This will take time to achieve in full, but we start now, as follows: accessible for persons with disabilities; 8. Provide incentives to providers of accessible solutions including software, hardware and applications; technology 9. Take such measures as will lessen the burden of acquisition of accessible technologies and associated devices for PWDs through fiscal means such as funding acquisitions, etc.; 10. Ensure that licensed providers of telecommunications services make available services and supporting technologies for persons with disabilities including emergency services, accessible public phones and relay services to enable persons with speech, hearing and seeing disabilities to communicate with the rest of society; 11. Ensure existing works in print format to be adapted into accessible format transformative forms which can be used by the blind without any liability; and 12. Promote Research and Development for ICT access for Persons with Disabilities. 6.2 The Market 6.2.1 Background This ICT policy has been formulated to spur economic growth, recognising ICTs as an enabler. The contributions of the ICT policy to The Market are in three domains, namely: Money: We want to use ICT to enable more people to make more money faster. It is our goal to give every Kenyan the opportunity to earn a good living by utilising the digital infrastructure that the government is investing in. Rules: This policy requires there is fairness in the market contracts and agreements are resources such as spectrum and carefully crafted rules that ensure that place, that transactions are honoured, enforced, and that that scarce national rights-of-way are fairly allocated. Things: For the Market to work efficiently and provide a platform for sellers and buyers, it needs infrastructure. It is our policy to judiciously use public funds to build state-of-the art infrastructure at the best possible price and make it available to the largest possible number of people. 6.2.2 Money Money, technology and people are the drivers of the digital economy. By mirroring the physical entities used in business, such as bank notes, land titles, certificates and so on with digital equivalents, business can be assisted to move much faster since it is no longer limited by the time it physically takes to move a business item from one geographic location to another. We call the process of designing digital equivalents for physical things “informatisation.” Digitisation is the state where some thing, state or process in the real world can be completely simulated in the digital space — and of course this requires maintenance of exactly the same legal protections that exist in the physical world. To speed up business and accelerate prosperity, financial instruments, including cash, must be fully “informatised” and “digitised.” The digital and sharing economies are predicated recognition of digital contracts for digital analogues. on the legal Knowledge Economy: The Government will enable the move from minimal value economic activities such as the export of unfinished, raw materials to higher value economic activities such as manufacturing, export of finished goods and a digital economy. However, we recognise that high value artefacts such as phones or cars require a complex manufacturing ecosystem involving many interrelated manufacturers, so for instance, to create a computer it is necessary to have metal forming, plastic extrusion, integrated circuit design, silicon fabrication, silicon packaging, specialty bonding materials, microelectromechanical fabrication, circuit layout, all the way up to operating system and application software development and hundreds of other specialty capabilities, each most likely in a different 1. Set Government Biennial will set Research five (5) Priorities: research Every priority two areas years and the provide funding to institutions of higher learning and private enterprise in the form of research grants, bonded scholarships, equipment purchase grants and postgraduate course recommendations and certifications in the priority areas. 2. Set Challenges: The government in consultation will define challenges and prizes in the priority areas. The solution to the challenges will become the intellectual property of the Government of Kenya, and may be licensed to indigenous Kenyan companies for productisation and manufacture. 3. Protect Intellectual Property: It is and will continue to be the policy of the government to provide robust protection and enforcement of Kenyan-developed intellectual property rights, and facilitate the rapid and advantageous acquisition of non-Kenyan_ intellectual property rights. 4. Provide Financial Incentives: Research and fundamental knowledge generation in Kenya has hitherto been the preserve of government agencies and institutions of higher learning. The Government believes that it is time for the private sector to get in on the act. 5. Innovation Hubs: The Government, in partnership with other arms will assist in the creation of innovation hubs across the country. Initially there will be 290 constituency innovation hubs which 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 developed ICT products, the Ministry of ICT will hold annual and national ICT shows where locally developed products showcased, the shows will provide a platform for developers industry and financial partners. locally county can be to meet 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 co-ordination 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 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.