Kenya is moving to commercialise anonymised data generated through its eCitizen platform and other government digital systems.
eCitizen is the official decentralised digital platform designed to provide unified access to Kenyan government services online. It currently offers more than 22,000 services from over 100 ministries, departments and county agencies.
Kenya's Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy is proposing a State-run marketplace through which businesses, researchers, NGOs and innovators could licence government datasets.
The initiative forms part of a broader National Data Governance Policy that would formally designate data as a strategic national asset and create the regulatory and commercial framework required to monetise it.
A new National Data Governance and Emerging Technologies Council would be established to aggregate data from government institutions and oversee the initiative, with a target of making at least 1,000 datasets available over five years.
The marketplace would operate under clear licensing models and pricing tiers, including free access for public-interest uses, with transparent revenue treatment for government data. A dedicated Data Governance Office would manage the platform's day-to-day operations.
Development and operation of the marketplace are estimated to cost up to Sh396 million ($3.07 million) over five years.
Non-personal eCitizen data earmarked for commercialisation include business registration trends, passport and immigration application volumes by region, birth, death and marriage registration trends, vehicle registration statistics, and land transaction volumes.
Data from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics and other State agencies would also be aggregated into the platform.
Additional datasets under consideration include traffic flow patterns and regional crop production data.
Personal data, including names, phone numbers, ID numbers and images, would be excluded, in line with Kenya's data protection legislation.
The proposal comes as Kenya expands its digital infrastructure ambitions.
According to the US International Trade Administration, the country's data economy could drive data centre investment of more than Sh104 billion ($806 million) by 2031 and accelerate growth in the AI sector, currently valued at Sh31 billion ($240 million).
Kenya could become one of the first African countries to establish a formal public data marketplace, placing it alongside more mature models such as Singapore's tiered public data platform and the UK's Ordnance Survey, which reportedly generates more than Sh34 billion ($263 million) annually from geospatial data licensing.
The policy aligns with a growing global trend of governments seeking to capture economic value from publicly generated data, which is increasingly being described by policymakers as a strategic national asset comparable to physical infrastructure.
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