Kenya Plans to Sell Government Data to Businesses — and the Anonymization Promise Has Limits

Kenya’s Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy has proposed a government-run data marketplace that would sell aggregated datasets from platforms like eCitizen to businesses, NGOs, and researchers — a plan the government says will cost KES 396 million to build and could underpin a KES 104 billion data economy.

Under the proposal, a new body called the National Data Governance and Emerging Technologies Council would manage the sale of at least 1,000 datasets over five years. The government says the data will be stripped of personal identifiers — names, phone numbers, ID numbers, and images — before sale. What remains are aggregate figures: business registration volumes by county, passport application trends, land transaction counts, vehicle registration data, crop production statistics, and traffic patterns. Some datasets would be free for public-interest uses; the rest priced in tiers that have not yet been defined. The ICT Authority did not respond to requests for comment on the proposal.

The proposal arrives against a specific backdrop. In May 2026, a court ordered Safaricom to pay KES 9.9 million after a customer data breach — the first major enforcement ruling under Kenya’s Data Protection Act 2019. Days before, the High Court froze NTSA’s automated traffic fines system over due-process concerns. And in 2025, a Kenyan health data partnership with the United States drew public scrutiny, with officials issuing the same kind of reassurances — personal data stays protected — that are now being offered again. The government’s stated framing is that data is “the new oil,” a national strategic asset it has been sitting on without monetising.

The “anonymized data” guarantee at the centre of the proposal has a well-documented limitation: aggregated government datasets can often be re-identified when combined with other datasets. Data researchers have demonstrated repeatedly that stripping names and phone numbers is not the same as making data unidentifiable — combining land transaction location data with passport application volumes by region, for instance, can narrow a population enough to profile individuals in smaller counties. Kenya’s Data Protection Act 2019 requires data protection impact assessments for high-risk processing, but the proposal as reported does not mention whether one has been commissioned. The Office of the Data Commissioner, the country’s privacy regulator, has not publicly commented on the plan.

The government points to US state data marketplaces as the model. The comparison is useful but incomplete. American states collect hundreds of millions from selling DMV records — a 2023 investigation by InvestigateTV found that 23 states took in at least $282 million in a single fiscal year, led by Georgia ($53M), California ($49M), and Indiana ($25M). But US DMV sales involve personal data: names, addresses, phone numbers, and driver IDs sold to insurers, private investigators, auto dealers, and data brokers. Kenya says its version will specifically exclude personal data, which is the right call legally — but it also means the revenue case is much harder to make. Buyers pay high prices for data that identifies people. Aggregate business registration trends and passport application volumes are worth considerably less on the open market.

That said, the proposal is not without merit if the datasets are genuinely well-structured. Agricultural lenders, insurers, and urban planners in Kenya regularly cite clean aggregate data as a gap — crop production statistics, land transaction frequency by region, and traffic pattern data are all commercially useful in the right format. A properly run government data marketplace could serve those needs at a price point much lower than private data vendors charge. The question is whether the KES 396 million build cost and the institutional capacity of a newly created Council are matched by the revenue the datasets would actually generate.

The Office of the Data Commissioner will need to assess whether the proposal’s anonymization standard clears the bar set by the Data Protection Act before any marketplace opens. That review, and the public debate around it, is where this goes next.

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