On 5 February 2026, in a conference room overlooking Nairobi National Park, Kenya quietly took a bold step into its next frontier: treating data not as exhaust from government systems, but as a strategic national asset that can transform services, protect rights, and power a digital economy for everyone. At the Public Sector Stakeholder Validation Workshop for the National Data Governance Policy, officials, regulators, counties, private sector, academia, and civil society sat around the same table to answer one big question: how do we turn scattered data into shared progress?
For years, Kenya’s data story has been one of islands. Ministries and agencies collected their own datasets in silos, built parallel data centres, and kept information locked away in spreadsheets, emails, and shared drives. Different institutions used different definitions, standards, and formats, making it hard to “see Kenya” in one coherent picture. The result was duplication, inconsistent statistics, and policy decisions that relied more on intuition than evidence. Citizens rarely knew what data government held about them, how it was used, or how to exercise their rights apart from Kenya Integrated Agricultural Management Information System (KIAMIS) data governance framework supporting the agriculture sector data in the Ministry of Agriculture and Livestock Development that soon will be also in line with the proposed national data governance policy.
The draft National Data Governance Policy flips this script. Its vision is clear: position Kenya as a data-driven society and a leading digital and knowledge economy, governed by modern data principles. At its heart is a simple but powerful shift: every organisation that holds public data must treat it as a shared national asset, managed in trust on behalf of the Kenyan people. That means common standards, single sources of truth, and citizens only giving the same information once, instead of filling the same details on every form they encounter.
To make this real, the policy proposes a new National Data Governance and Emerging Technologies Council, backed by law and supported by a professional Data Governance Office led by a Chief Data Officer. This is not another talk shop. The Council will set the strategic direction, align data initiatives with national priorities, and hold ministries, counties and even private players to account for how they manage and share data. The Data Governance Office will do the heavy lifting: building a national data lake, defining interoperability standards, coordinating data officers across MDAs and counties, and turning dusty datasets into usable, high-impact data products.
The policy goes further by centering people and rights. It anchors data governance in the Constitution, the Data Protection Act and the Access to Information Act, insisting that dignity, privacy and autonomy of data subjects must guide every stage of the data lifecycle. It calls for national campaigns on data rights, special protections for vulnerable groups, and clear rules for surveillance technologies, algorithmic decision-making and whistleblower data. Trust is treated not as a slogan, but as an outcome of transparency, accountability and meaningful public participation.
Recognising that culture eats strategy for breakfast, one of the most ambitious pillars is Data Culture and Change Management. The policy bluntly acknowledges low data literacy, resistance to sharing, and “gatekeeping” behaviours inside institutions. Its response is equally bold: embed data literacy and ethics in schools, public service training, and national campaigns; tie data governance competencies to performance contracts; and design incentives for public-private collaboration and ethical data monetisation.
The roadmap is already on the table. After validation workshops, online public participation and technical refinements, the policy is slated for approval, launch and adoption in 2026, with implementation from 1 July 2026. If Kenya follows through, 2026 may be remembered as the year the country stopped treating data as a by-product of bureaucracy and started using it as new gold fuel for better services, smarter policies, digital innovation and a more empowered citizenry.
The writer is a Senior Lecturer and a Consultant
