At WSO2Con Africa 2026, ICT Secretary Mary N. Kerema gave the government’s digitization record a mixed review that doubled as a warning.
Kenya now runs more than 22,000 online government services, a figure she used to establish that the country has done the visible part of digital transformation well. However, she pushed past that number quickly, framing it as only half the story and arguably the easier half.
Her real target was what happens after a citizen submits a request, and where the delay actually comes from, not the point of submission, but everything that happens once the request lands on the other side.
“The problem is our backend is still pretty manual.”
This describes a system where an online form gets filed digitally, then processed by hand behind the scenes, with none of the speed the front end promised.
A clear illustration of this is with the passport office, where applicants still show up carrying a physical file of birth certificates and other documents that the government already holds in its systems.
“If the data already exists, why is the citizen the one carrying it between offices?”
The answer, Kerema said, is that no single agency holds a trusted, shared version of the truth, so each office asks citizens to prove what should already be provable.
The fix is structural rather than cosmetic. Kenya has launched a Government Enterprise Architecture built on an all-of-government approach, moving away from agencies that operate as isolated silos toward systems designed to work across ministries.
Sitting alongside it is a new interoperability platform still in development, meant to let government entities share data with each other while giving institutions and citizens control over who gets access to what.
The goal, in her words, is “one citizen, one journey, many government capabilities.”
People who need a government service should not have to figure out which office to visit or which official to contact. They should be able to say what they need, verify their identity, and have connected systems handle the rest.
The complexity of government services should stay behind the scenes instead of becoming the citizen’s problem.
This is, however, not a purely technical fix. It is a shift in how government designs services from the outset, prioritizing outcomes over individual transactions and treating data as shared infrastructure rather than something each department protects on its own.
Digitizing the interface was only the first step. What happens behind it will determine whether citizens in Kenya actually notice a difference.
This is where agentic AI comes in. Once systems are connected, AI agents can handle routine backend tasks and flag only cases that need a human decision.
That depends entirely on the interoperability layer she described, a fitting point to raise at a conference built around integration and API management. The AI already exists, but without integration, it has nothing to act on.
