The Priority to Develop Kenya and East Africa

The government of Kenyan President William Ruto includes an emphasis on developing digital infrastructure and a Digital Economy among its goals. The 57-year-old Ruto was elected the nation's leader in 2022, following almost 25 years of involvement in Kenyan politics.

The nation's “mile high” capital city of Nairobi is naturally considered to be prime area for development, as are the southern highlands in which it sits that extend down to Mount Kilimanjaro and its southern neighbor Tanzania's key city of Arusha, along with its major port of Mombasa in the nation's southeast.

Kenya and Tanzania are in fact both focused to some degree on digital infrastructure, as they also anchor the regional, eight-nation trading block known as the East Africa Community (EAC), which has dreams of one day creating a single nation to be called the East African Federation. Such a nation would have Swahili as a lingua franca (along with English), would encompass an area similar to the continental US and a population to match the US as well.

IDCA Research shows a long arduous road to the goal of creating a transformed economy, with some bright spots in the picture. Kenya's electricity grid, for example, is highly renewable, approaching 90%. Kenya's economic efficiency in producing emissions is also good, similar to that of the US. But yet, its digital infrastructure is lacking, which shows that Kenya's economic efficiency is due in large part to a relatively small economy overall.

Kenya's per-person income is only about 20% of the world average, and substantially smaller than that when compared to the US and other developed nations. Even so, it is almost twice that of its fellow EAC members.

So there is a lot of economic and digital infrastructure work to be done. Kenya and the region's data center footprint requires less (often much less) than 1% of its electricity grid, compared to slightly more than 1% for the world and 2-3% of most developed countries.

Indeed, data center development – the foundation of all digital infrastructures and digital economy dreams – shows the most disparity in the world's technology sphere. In fact, the disparity among nations approaches a factor of 100,000X. President Ruto seems to have his nation on the right path when it comes to building a Digital Economy, as does Tanzania's President Samia Sahan as well as Paul Kagame, the leader of smaller nation Rwanda's dynamic economy. Kenya and East Africa should be at or near the top of anyone's priority list when it comes to building data centers and other digital infrastructure.