The Semacraft Blog

Sparking conversations among citizens is the first step to creating change. 

Kenyans woke up to a pleasant surprise one March morning. Graffiti with a political message sprayed on walls in Nairobi’s central business district. And not the terrible kind that is an eye-sore with good intentions. This was “stop-and-stare”  graffiti that not only made news in Kenya but overseas as well.

Image: The Guardian (click to read more)

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A Pasha center in rural Kenya.

Mbumbuni is a rural market town in Kenya’s Mbooni East District approximately 120km from Nairobi. Within the market is one of the Kenya ICT Board supported Pasha Centers and probably one of the best equiped cybercafes I have seen. When I visited the area in August of 2011, the 3G signal was poor and the center was using a GSM router connecting via EDGE to provide access to clients. The resulting experience was of course poor. For the residents in the area, the next cybercafe with a good connection is in Masii 8km away or in Wote town 50km away. For anyone wishing to register with the tax authority (a prerequisite to opening a bank account), a working cybercafe is the primary mode of accessing the authority’s online portal. There is no way of obtaining the registration at a KRA office. Cybercafes and Pasha centers charge an average of Ksh150 and as high as KSh250 to help clients complete the process and only a per minute charge for those savvy enough to login and do it themselves. For the residents of Mbumbuni, the Pasha center is their first option. Other options are guaranteed to be more expensive.

In the last four months I have travelled to parts of Kenya I only read about. Some of them almost 600 km away from Nairobi and others just an hours drive away. I have seen places where cybercafés are doing great and others where they are struggling to stay open.  The landscape is varied but inspiring. Our estimates put the number of cybercafes in Kenya at approximately 2,500 most of them concentrated in the more densely populated parts of the country. Although statistics show a growing number of Internet users (35% of the population at last count), the vast number appear to be using their mobile phone as their primary gateway. Although feature phones can now provide 3G Internet access, play music and take pictures they still can’t print, scan or edit documents. With very low PC penetration in the country the rational decision is to therefore default to cybercafes for these tasks and others not yet available on mobile. Such as eGovernment.

A sign at a cyber in rural Kenya

The move by government departments and agencies such as the Kenya Revenue Authority to port services onto online spaces and then discontinue offline provision can be seen as a sign of progress. However, in using eGovernment to scale services fast across large areas at low cost, new barriers to access emerge. Digital barriers and cost barriers. These barriers have created new opportunities for cybercafé owners and Pasha center entrepreneurs allowing them to charge for a service that didn’t exist only a couple of years ago. The cyber café has now acquired a new role as an intermediary to government services introducing with it new costs of intermediation.

Whereas eGovernment presents a new opportunity for private enterprise in the form of new intermediation services, the government still needs to find ways of encouraging telcos to deploy better last mile connectivity (3G, LTE) to rural places where the financial investment may not achieve ROI in the short term. If poor connectivity remains a problem, the services may not be any closer to the people than they were before when the residents of Mbumbuni and Masii had to travel to Machakos, Wote or even Nairobi to get government services. In my opinion, there are three areas the Directorate of eGovernment and other actors in the space may consider giving priority as Kenya marches on into a fully digital future.

Better connectivity. Better 3G or LTE connectivity for the last mile to the cybercafes located in rural areas is a good place to start. Providing better connectivity could trigger consumption of data as people find utility for it. In places such as Maai Mahiu and Isinya we heard from a couple of people how frustrating spotty connections are. In Isinya, 40km from the city of Nairobi, residents opt to travel to Kajiado town or Kitengela rather than endure the local cybercafe’s unreliable connections.

Pricing Interventions / Guidelines. When intermediation services become high enough to become a bona fide barrier to access, there’s a problem. Ksh250 is enough to feed a family of four for a day or two. In areas where government services are only available online, this could mean that some families opt out of crucial government services they shouldn’t be having to do without. The initial premise is to bring services closer to the people. High financial costs neuter that objective. Introduction of price caps that keep it financially interesting for enterpreneurs to provide access to these services while remaining accessible to the majority of the people maybe an option worthy of some consideration.

Design for mGovernment. 24 million mobile devices are hard to ignore. Policy guidelines that allows government departments to design and deploy services on the mobile platform should be a priority in the short term. If bringing services closer to citizens is a priority, the mobile handset is as close as it can get.

As new formal intermediaries to government services begin to emerge with the rollout of new infrastructure and services, governments need to keep everyone in the ecosystem on the same page. Cybercafe owners need to remain motivated to provide the services, government departments need to create and train technical and customer care teams and citizens need to be educated on how to access and utilize these services.

An M-Pesa shop in Masii, Kenya.

During the Internet Governance Forum conference held in Nairobi last September, Kenya’s head for e-Government Dr. Catherine Getao made an observation that probably holds very true in many places worldwide. Private sector innovations can happen in the absence of government policy but in many instances government can’t implement innovation in service delivery until legislation and policy is in place. This was in response to a comment I had made on the disparity between the rate of innovation adoption by government when compared to the private sector and the citizens.

Mobile money in Kenya provides a fairly good example of this. M-Pesa is not directly regulated under a full banking license but operates under a special dispensation from industry regulators. At public roll-out,  the MPesa service allowed urban Kenyans, for instance, to send money easily and more safely to their rural folk. Service providers then implemented utility payments via mobile money and integration of mobile money with conventional banking services. Within 3 years, firms like PesaPal and iPay had emerged  providing a bridge between mobile money and e-commerce.  Services  in this space are continuing to evolve every year.

Although I can send money, pay utility bills, buy goods and check my bank balance through my mobile phone, I still can’t pay government fees, taxes or levies on it. I still have to go to a bank like I did 5 years ago. Hence Dr Gitau’s comment alluding to the delay caused by the (usually long) wait for development of legislation to guide government adoption of new technology for service delivery.

So whereas mobile money was launched and has continued to evolve in an environment where regulation and policy was yet to be fully developed, the government was unable to leverage this technological gains for its own good. Mobile money in Kenya is a good example of how innovation preceding regulation can be good for the country. Although governments can create an environment for phenomenal progress (like Kenya’s has done), their inability to keep up with the momentum triggered by the private sector for service delivery (due to bureaucracy) is an example of how innovation preceding regulation can slow progress in eGovernance.

This is where the challenge lies for those designing the next generation of eGov services as well as the agencies/departments seeking to improve service delivery through ICT. A highly collaborative multi-stakeholder approach is, in my opinion, necessary to not only accelerate the rate of innovation but the speed at which governance frameworks evolve to cater for the emerging ‘new normal’.