The Kenyan government is moving to turn its vast reserves of public digital data into a revenue stream, with a formal proposal to sell anonymised datasets to businesses, researchers, and civil society organisations.
The Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy (MICTDE) plans to establish an agency to aggregate data from government institutions and oversee its commercialization, with the proposed National Data Governance and Emerging Technologies Council facilitating the sale of at least 1,000 datasets from various sources over the next five years.
The proposal is contained in the Draft Final National Data Governance Policy, May 2026, which positions data as a strategic national asset with growing economic value. In the policy’s foreword, Cabinet Secretary William Kabogo Gitau states that data is no longer merely a by product of transactions or administration, but a strategic national asset capable of strengthening governance, improving service delivery, and accelerating inclusive socio-economic transformation.
Non-personal data collected through eCitizen which processes millions of transactions annually includes business registration trends, demand for government services, passport and immigration application volumes by region, and birth and death records. Beyond eCitizen, the government also holds datasets it believes could be monetized, including traffic flow patterns and regional crop production data collected by the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and other state agencies.
Privacy protections are built into the framework. Personal data including names, phone numbers, email addresses, identification numbers, and images will not be available on the marketplace, in line with Kenya’s data protection laws, which prohibit the sharing of personal data without consent.
The policy proposes clear licensing models and pricing tiers, including free access for public good uses, alongside transparent revenue treatment for government data.
Kenya could become one of the first countries in Africa to establish a formal public data marketplace. Comparable models already exist in Singapore, which provides free access to some datasets while charging for specialized information, and in the United Kingdom, where the Ordnance Survey generates over Sh34 billion annually from the sale of state owned geospatial data.
The proposal has not gone without scrutiny. Amnesty International Kenya has noted that public trust in data governance is crucial, pointing to past instances where state agencies have been accused of misusing digital systems, raising broader questions about accountability in Kenya’s evolving data landscape. Kenya’s broader data economy could spur investment in data centre infrastructure worth more than Sh104 billion by 2031 and give a boost to the country’s artificial intelligence sector.
