The Communications Authority of Kenya is inviting youth, women, and people with disabilities to a free online session on April 7 where the focus will be on how to bid for government tenders.
The session runs from 10am to noon, and anyone interested can join via this link.
On paper, this is not a new idea. The government has a legal requirement that public agencies set aside at least 30% of their procurement spending for enterprises owned by youth, women, and persons with disabilities, a program known as AGPO that has been around since 2013.
CA’s forum fits within that broader push hoping to fill the gap of awareness and capacity.
AGPO has pushed more businesses to register for government work, but the same problems keep coming up. Low awareness, delayed payments, and corruption have followed the program since its early years.
Many people who qualify simply do not know the process of bidding for government tenders, and those who do often struggle to wade through an increasingly digital procurement system.
The CA’s framing around electronic procurement is telling. Kenya has been digitizing its public tendering infrastructure for years, yet the fact that a regulatory agency still needs to run a basic orientation session in 2026 suggests the rollout has left a lot of people behind.
If the system were accessible, the forum would not need to exist. Whether the session goes beyond surface-level information and addresses the practical blockers people actually face will depend on how the CA chooses to run it.
A sensitization forum is an entry point, not a fix. The harder test is whether agencies are actually hitting the 30% AGPO threshold, paying suppliers on time, and running evaluation processes that small businesses can trust.
Until that changes, sessions like this one will keep happening without much changing underneath.
