Click Icons Above To Access Information On Other Media/ICTs In Kenya
Click here to return to Summary of Media and Communication in Kenya

Internet Access and Use in Kenya

Internet access remains limited in Kenya, especially in rural areas. [1]  Indeed, low levels of access were responsible for Kenya’s ranking of 116th globally (10th in Africa) on the International Telecommunications Union’s 2009 ICT Development Index. [2]  However, use of the web is expected to receive a boost from the SEACOM fiber optic cable, which reached Mombasa in July 2009 with the promise of vastly expanding bandwidth, increasing connection speeds and lowering operating costs. Kenya will also be connected via the East Africa Submarine Cable System (EASSy) and The East Africa Marine System (TEAMS). [3] Additional bandwidth may contribute to greater internet access in homes, businesses, internet cafes and on mobile phones across the country.

But there is a catch in this bright outlook: in order for the new fiber optic cables to deliver on Kenyans’ expectations, last-mile connectivity needs upgrading to be able to deliver broadband internet access to consumers at affordable prices. On that front, Kenya’s infrastructure remains weak. [4]  Granted, some existing internet users did enthusiastically report immediate improvements in speed and cost when the cables went live, but the national impact remains to be seen. [5] 

Only about one fifth of survey respondents said they used the internet for any purpose in the last year, and even fewer appear to use the internet regularly (14 percent of respondents said they had been online in the last week). This group of frequent users, who would most likely to feature as targets in an  internet-based outreach or communication campaign, is predominantly young, male, relatively wealthy and relatively well educated compare to the population as a whole (Table 1).

Table 1
    

Eleven percent of survey respondents said they have internet access of some kind at home, though only 5 percent said they have a working computer at home. The statistical gap may reflect people accessing the internet at home on mobile phones (something which 16 percent of all respondents reported having tried at some point on any phone), but this requires more research.

Barriers to use

Respondents who had used the internet in the last year were asked about their activities; the results in Chart 1 suggest that the full potential of the internet is not close to being met.

Chart 1
       

Aside from limitations in telecommunications infrastructure, the main obstacle to using the internet cited in the survey was a lack of knowledge about the internet: more than half who said they had not used the internet in the last year attributed this to not knowing how to use it, while 41 percent of nonusers (representing a third of all Kenyan adults) said they do not even know what the internet is. The knowledge gap is wider among women, older Kenyans and those with no formal education (Table 2).

Table 2
                    
Addressing this knowledge gap is vital if the internet is to become a more-effective platform for broad-based participation in e-development activities such as distance learning, healthcare services delivery or government transparency initiatives. That said, relatively high levels of internet awareness among younger respondents may bode well for the future internet use trend.

Still, even if the internet is better understood by most people, many potential new users may run up against the same barriers that limit Kenyans’ access to television: prohibitive costs, gaps in household technology ownership (of computers, in this case, rather than TV sets) and electricity supply constraints. As mentioned previously, there are signs that Kenyans are already working around some of these problems by accessing the internet (and to a much lesser extent, television programs) via mobile phones. 

[1]The World Bank World Development Indicators cite fewer than one fixed internet broadband subscription per 100 people.

[2]Information Society Statistical Profiles 2009: Africa. International Telecommunication Union, 2009. http://www.itu.int/dms_pub/itu-d/opb/ind/D-IND-RPM.AF-2009-PDF-E.pdf, and Measuring the Information Society: the ICT Development Index. International Telecommunication Union, 2009. http://www.itu.int/ITU-D/ict/publications/idi/2009/material/IDI2009_w5.pdf

[3[Kenya: Innovation and ICT. African Economic Outlook. http://www.africaneconomicoutlook.org/en/countries/east-africa/kenya

[4]“East Africa: The Fiber Optic Cable Is Here, but Region Is Not Ready for It,” Africa News Update, 09.07.2009. http://www.afrika.no/Detailed/18693.html

[5] “Kenya Internet Costs Go Down.” Capital Business, 14 October 2009. http://www.capitalfm.co.ke/business/Kenyabusiness/Kenya-internet-costs-go-down-3194.html