“Local governments need of technological innovations for service delivery and accountability in governance. Existing innovations for local governance in Kenya need enhanced support to enable collaboration between government, civil society and technologists.”
February 2016 End date
March 2017
Issue
In Kenya, engagement between technology ecosystem players is low. This also applies to citizen engagement with governments at both national and county levels. Start-ups are developing innovations that sometimes fail to scale up because of these limitations in the relationships between government, private sector, academia, citizens and policy-makers.
Project
iHub has played a key role in enabling collaboration in the tech ecosystem in Kenya and around Africa. This grant is to suport iHub to strengthen collaboration between actors at local government level in order to build capacity and extend existing innovation through knowledge sharing and transfer of skills.
Collaborative engagement is at the core of the technology governance ecosystem. It is through this engagement that governments can adopt new innovations to strengthen service delivery. Using community forums, training workshops and outreach, iHub aims to fulfil these objectives:
- provide advisory services to local communities and governments on issues such as innovation policies and best practices
- foster understanding of service delivery challenges that could be addressed by technology innovations, and scale existing innovations
- initiate collaborative engagements that facilitate deeper relationships among various ecosystem players
- support development of innovation and entrepreneurship capacity at county level.
Partner
Based in Nairobi, iHub provides a platform to promote and enable the growth of the Kenyan tech community. It allows different stakeholders such as technologists, investors, academia, the private sector, government, civil society organisations and citizens to come together and bring their ideas to life. The iHub is also committed to championing and accelerating the growth of other tech hubs, both in Kenya and on the continent, through its research, user experience and consulting initiatives.