Rebuilding Digital Inclusion for the Rural Counties of Kenya-ITU’s Connect2Recover Research Competition

The varied attempts to address the connectivity challenge in Kenya (like everywhere else in the world) such as through Universal Service Fund (USF), private sector initiatives or philanthropy have had limited success in reaching the unserved and underserved.

The pandemic injected a reinvigorated appreciation of how connectivity can give all citizens access to multiple opportunities such as access to online academic content, adequate healthcare information, e-government services and online shopping, allow governments to deliver much needed services and enable businesses to thrive – a backbone that sustained the activities in Kenya since March 2020 when the lockdown came into effect [1].

Similar to the rest of the world, the lockdown came with the measures of closing down learning institutions and certain types of businesses, restriction of movement across the country’s international borders and across borders of certain counties as well as introduction of daily curfew hours [2].

Although this notable pandemic implications highlight an unprecedented case of the need for connectivity, a connectivity conundrum is not something new in Kenya. The challenge of the digital divide has been…

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Rebuilding Digital Inclusion for the Rural Counties of Kenya