By Bobina Zulfa
Nairobi, Kenya: Nairobi hosted the Open Government Partnership (OGP)’s Africa and Middle East Regional Meeting in March 2025, aptly themed ‘Rebuilding trust through open government.’ Among the key thematic areas of the Partnership and particularly for Kenya, is digital governance, a crucial focus area of utmost importance given today’s rapidly evolving technological landscape and the need to shape a future of transparency, accountability, and citizen engagement in the digital age.
Globally, the widespread impact of digital technologies have inspired a surge of multi-stakeholder efforts to tackle key digital governance issues. These include, digital infrastructures, data and AI governance, the commitment to human rights, democracy and the rule of law in digitisation as well as issues to do with the digital economy among several others.
An assessment of citizen centricity of Kenya’s digital governance
In our recently concluded study titled Digitising Kenya, we set out to understand the state of digital governance in Kenya, how it is conceptualised and ultimately implemented with regards to making the Kenyan government more open, accountable and responsive to its citizens.
From Kenya’s current and fifth National Action Plan, a commitment is made towards addressing exclusion in digital services and the digital divide as well as the enhancement of open channels for meaningful citizen engagement on both digital services and policies. This stance builds on an acknowledgement by OGP’s members in Kenya that the country still grapples with several challenges including inaccessibility of digital technologies to marginalised citizens, fundamental differences in definitions,
priorities in delivering inclusive digital governance, de-prioritisation of gender data-informed decision making and lack of meaningful public participation in digital governance decision-making on its path towards achieving inclusive digital governance.
The study uncovered a great disconnect between how civil society actors understood inclusive digital governance. To most of them, digital governance meant bridging of digital divides while on the other hand, the majority of government actors viewed it through the lens of last mile connectivity of computer infrastructure.
This disconnect, deeply reflected and transposed onto the framing of the country’s digitisation priorities which tends to reduce digital governance to a purely technical question that views the integration of ICTs in government operations as primarily meant for improved service delivery. This idea generally pertains to steps towards increased government efficiency, modernity and so on.
Considering global digital governance literature and best practices, it is clear that improved digital service delivery is only one half of the pie. An approach which views digital governance as an interactive system where citizens have more influence over government policies and where governments are also equally responsive to their citizenry is another important piece of the puzzle.
Overall, this study found that truly inclusive digital governance is marked by the concurrent delivery of government services together with citizen participation, transparency and accountability. Although, currently the common practice is the prioritisation of certain aspects over others, we’ve seen a strong emphasis on speed, modernity, precision and revenue accumulation from digital service delivery, these have often taken precedence over the equally important but overlooked components of e-democracy.
Another important aspect to fostering inclusive digital governance is integration and embedding of a data driven decision making mechanism in digitisation processes such that actions taken and imposed on the citizenry are not out of touch with their living conditions. This disconnect only works to frustrate public trust towards the government since they feel there isn’t meaningful engagement in decision making or accountability.
The report also states that the most efficient way for the government to access this data on its policies’ impacts on populations would be through feedback loops across various Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) which is largely missing across the digitisation landscape in Kenya.
Additionally, the integration of gender data particularly was also advanced by the report here given its robust nature in taking on a more intersectional perspective in data collection, analysis and so forth.
Lastly, the failure to address persisting digital divides remains a big stumbling block to attaining inclusive digital governance in Kenya. With a lot of people still unable to meaningfully receive digital services or to digitally participate in government processes, these divides further deepen existing inequalities especially for already marginalized groups such as those related to gendered or social or economic or other inequalities.
In the Digitising Kenya study, it was found that the usage gap was what majority of Kenyans were grappling with which has to do with meaningful engagement of technologies by the citizenry in a way that allows them to actually benefit from the government’s digital service delivery and e-democracy aspects.
Rethinking digitisation
In line with the goal of rebuilding trust through open government, The ‘Rethinking digitisation’ toolkit developed from the aforementioned study’s recommendations makes a strong case for how designing and implementing inclusive, citizen centric digital governance can work towards galvanising the state’s strategic priorities together with citizen’s differing needs and realities. A key factor for achieving this is the existence of a shared understanding of what inclusive digital governance actually means, which in many ways dictates how it is enacted by different actors.
The toolkit also advocates for a more human-centred approach to data, emphasizing the need for different data sources, including qualitative, descriptive, and nuanced forms of gender data to ensure that policies effectively tackle gender-based digital inequities.
Issues such as the uptake of eCitizen point to this usage gap which essentially hampers building of trust where citizens believe the government’s priorities such as revenue collection are corrosive to their existing realities as is.
Ultimately, while there is more to it, the above factors provide a solid foundation for unpacking Kenya’s digital governance landscape as relates to inclusion, citizen centricity and the idea of rebuilding public trust while also proposing a number of best practice approaches for thinking around this kind of more contextualised digital governance.
Story republished from Pollicy
