Kenya’s government is drawing up plans to sell data it collects through public platforms, and the model it appears to be building toward has a long-running precedent in the United States, where states have been quietly generating hundreds of millions of dollars doing exactly that.
The Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy has proposed creating a National Data Governance and Emerging Technologies Council, a new body that would aggregate data from across government institutions and manage how it gets sold.
The plan is to make at least 1,000 datasets available over 5 years through a government-run marketplace that would cost up to KES 396 million to build and operate.
The data in question is not personal. What the government wants to sell is the aggregated, anonymized kind: business registration trends from eCitizen, passport application volumes broken down by region, vehicle registration statistics, land transaction figures, crop production data, and traffic patterns.
Information that, on its own, tells you nothing about a specific person but in bulk gives researchers, businesses, NGOs, and investors a detailed picture of how the country is functioning.
The proposal does draw a clear line at personal data. Names, phone numbers, ID numbers, email addresses, and images are off the table, which aligns with Kenya’s existing data protection laws.
According to Business Daily, the policy frames data as a national strategic asset, which is a way of saying the government believes it has been sitting on something economically valuable and has not been collecting on it.
Whether the marketplace actually generates significant revenue will depend on how the datasets are priced and how many buyers show up.
Kenya is not the first to attempt to make money from selling data. In the US, state Departments of Motor Vehicles (DMVs) have been selling driver information for 30 years under a federal law that allows them to share names, addresses, phone numbers and driver IDs with insurers, private investigators, auto dealers, towing companies, data brokers, and universities.
This is personal data, the kind Kenya says it will not sell, and it is highly lucrative.
An investigation by InvestigateTV found that 23 states collected at least $282 million in a single fiscal year from selling this information. Georgia led with over $53 million. California took in $49 million. Indiana brought in $25 million. Ohio collected $20 million from 289 companies alone.
The comparison is not a perfect one. Kenya’s proposal specifically excludes personal data, so it is not building the same infrastructure as the American DMV system.
Still, it illustrates the scale of revenue that becomes possible when governments treat their data holdings as a commercial product rather than an administrative byproduct.
READ: e-Citizen to Display Commercial Ads in Aggressive Revenue Drive
What Kenya is proposing is closer to what some governments have done with open data portals, except with a pricing structure attached. Some datasets would be free for public interest uses, and others priced according to tiers yet to be defined.
The government has not specified which datasets would fall into which category, or how it plans to prevent the anonymized data from being re-identified once it is in private hands, which remains a real technical and legal concern in any data marketplace.
We reached out to the ICT Authority, but they did not respond to requests for comment.
