Information, Communication and the Digital Economy Cabinet Secretary (CS) Eliud Owalo has announced that the government cheap smart phones will cost Sh5,600.
While giving the ICT ministry’s scorecard for the past year on Monday, Owalo noted that the nation will embark on locally assembling smartphones, and the first batch will be rolled out in the next one month.
“We have gone a step further to partner with the private sector to embark on the assembly of smart enables phones in the Kenyan market. We are going to be able to roll out cheap smart-enabled phones at a unit cost of about Sh5,600 ($40) within the next month,” he said.
“We will subsequently move from local assembly to local manufacture of the handsets and we move to the next level of local manufacture of computers.”
The ICT CS further noted that the nation is also taking the trajectory of embracing e-commerce and the government has already started taking advantage of the ICT infrastructure.
So far, he said, the government has installed 442 public WiFi hotspots, 22,000KM of fibre, 179 innovation hubs and 112 Jitume labs.
He went on to add that the government projects to digitalize all its services by the end of the year, and has so far onboarded 5,084 services while 2,550 have been partially effected.
Another 9,362 services have been identified that can be possibly digitalized, majorly focusing on Revenue collection, Transport, Education, border control and citizen services.
