The Kenya Ministry of ICT and Digital Economy has released a draft document titled ‘Kenya National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2025–2030’ with public comments on the strategy expected by January 19 2024.
The document is written to harness the transformative potential of AI to drive the country’s socio-economic development and is a proactive and ambitious roadmap to position Kenya as an African leader in AI by creating an action plan for a robust, inclusive, and sustainable AI-driven future.
“Kenya’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy envisions the country as the leading AI hub for model innovation, driving sustainable development, economic growth, and social inclusion while positioning itself as an AI research and application leader in Africa,” reads the document.
“The strategy provides a comprehensive framework to guide Kenya in harnessing the transformative power of AI, ensuring its deployment benefits all sectors of society while adhering to ethical principles and inclusivity”
Kenya, with over 22 million active internet users, is emerging as a significant hub for AI research and development in Africa with a growing number of initiatives focused on using AI to address local and regional challenges, the document notes.
The document further notes that existing digital infrastructure, including the National Optic Fibre Network Backhaul Initiative (NOFBI) which plans to deploy over 100,000 km of optic fibre by 2027 could be upgraded to support AI applications by offering robust cloud computing resources and data management services.
The strategy seeks to establish a governance framework to promote the use of AI in critical sectors, including agriculture, healthcare, security, education, and public service delivery.
The government has already identified use-cases within the AI ecosystem fitting with its Bottom Up Transformation Agenda (BETA):
- In the realm of natural language processing regarding large language models
- In healthcare, two critical use cases are under consideration; a maternal health chatbot in local dialects to provide accurate pregnancy and childbirth information, and an expanded disease advisory system building on the existing platforms
- The education sector has prioritized intelligent tutoring systems and multilingual teacher training modules to improve access and quality of education
- For agriculture, emerging use cases include translating existing data into farmer-friendly formats through audio in local languages and developing AI-powered fertilizer recommendation systems
- Public sector use-cases include multilingual chatbots and virtual assistants to improve service delivery
- The creative sector could benefit from an AI-powered national digital creative platform to enhance market access and support local content creators
“Natural Language Processing (NLP) is a focus area driven by Kenya’s rich linguistic diversity, with research aimed at developing solutions for local languages with chatbots that can interact through various local languages. Other emerging research efforts aim to apply computer vision to practical applications in agriculture, such as crop disease detection, and in healthcare, particularly medical imaging analysis.
Kenya’s leadership in mobile money has also spurred substantial research into Machine Learning for financial inclusion, aiming to broaden access to financial services through innovative AI applications”
As AI continues to integrate into everyday life, the Ministry cautions that unchecked growth without clear regulations could result in negative outcomes, such as its exploitation for harmful purposes.
Other than Kenya, the continent already has a growing number of National AI Strategies:
- Egypt
- Rwanda
- Benin
- Morocco
- Mauritius
- Sierra Leone, and
- Tunisia,
with
- Nigeria, and
- South Africa
recently adding to the list of countries with National AI strategies.
You can read the strategy document here.
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