By Leonard Mabele, iLabAfrica Research Centre, Strathmore University

The unveiling of Kenya’s Digital Economy Blueprint in May 2019 promises a great economic transformation driven by a number of factors such as Digital Skills, Infrastructure, Innovation-driven Entrepreneurship, Digital Government among other factors.

With the vision of a digitally empowered citizenry living in a digitally enabled society, the Kenyan government stands to nurture an ecosystem that can rapidly grow to bridge the digital divide and create more opportunities for its citizens ahead of other countries within the region. The Big Four Agenda which covers Agriculture, Healthcare, Manufacturing and Housing sectors is emphasised in the preamble of the document even as Kenya strategically moves towards achieving the ambitiously outlined vision 2030. One thing that cuts across all the pillars described in this Blueprint is the strategic adoption and use of technology to deliver valuable returns. Joe Mucheru, the Cabinet Secretary of the Ministry of ICT, notes that the adoption of new technologies is creating well-paying jobs for professionals of diverse backgrounds translating into improvement in quality of life and increased connectedness.

The mention of the term “Digital Economy” calls for integration of various technologies working in tandem for the different applications to spur the economic growth and as Joe Mucheru points out, most of these technologies have not been in existence for many generations. In fact, 70% of them are just emerging. Some of these emerging technologies include Big Data and Analytics, Internet of Things, Artificial Intelligence, Blockchain among others which are already delivering immense returns to a number of companies globally. In the quest to achieve a sustainable digital economy, any country would require these technologies to be sufficiently developed and be easily customisable to fit within its population. This would definitely rely on the capacity of various industries/companies to develop this and also continually investigate on their improvement. What if this requires a huge cost of Research and Development (R&D)? What if companies do not have enough capacity in terms of skill to deliver on this?

These foregoing two questions are just among the many questions that established industries and even startup companies are battling with on delivering emerging technology-solutions that can leapfrog the achievement of the indicators of a digital economy in this era. The global experience obtained from companies such as Google, Microsoft, IBM, Apple, Intel among other companies elucidates that there is a huge cost involved in keeping the R&D units ahead of time to develop relevant and sustainable digital products and solutions. Moreover, a number of companies also do not have employees whose life is to sharpen their skills on building the digital economy-dependent emerging technologies as their return on investment might nosedive and fail to keep the company (ies) alive.

This observation therefore beckons for a more society-inclusive approach that can guarantee growth of knowledge within an economy and also ensure that the operation of the various companies stays financially sustainable. The collaboration between the industry and academia hence becomes a key model to build upon in order to achieve a desired digital economy. A paper titled “The Rise of Computing Research in East Africa: The Relationship Between Funding, Capacity and Research Community in a Nascent Field” written by Marsh et al explains that a framework that provides funding to researchers within an academic setup exploring Computer Science-based studies can easily result to development of commercial products enabling the digital economy to flourish. The collaboration done by Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and companies such as Mathworks and Google is a great example of commercialisation of higher learning and research to drive digital economies. In Kenya, the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS) is leading Strathmore University (SU), University of Nairobi (UoN) and Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology (JKUAT) to enhance industry-academia linkages to achieve sustainable innovation for the industry. If the digital economy blueprint stands a great chance of practical realisation in Kenya, the industry-academia collaboration forms a good ticket to locally develop enough capacity to build the emerging technologies and also investigate the business models alongside regulatory frameworks that can not only drive the achievement of the blueprint but also lead to growth of new knowledge locally as well as create jobs and grow innovative startups in the era of these emerging technologies.