Kenya’s Draft AI and Emerging Technologies Policy: What It Proposes

Alongside the Artificial Intelligence Bill currently before the Senate, Kenya’s ICT ministry is running a separate process: a draft policy setting out how the government wants to govern AI and other emerging technologies at an institutional level. The two are easy to confuse, since both surfaced in 2026 and both talk about AI governance, but they are different documents, developed by different arms of government, aimed at different things.

A policy, not a bill, and newer than Kenya’s existing AI strategy

The Draft Kenya Artificial Intelligence and Other Emerging Technologies Policy was published for public consultation in July 2026 by the State Department for ICT and the Digital Economy, under the Ministry of Information, Communications and the Digital Economy. It builds on, and is distinct from, the earlier Kenya National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2025-2030, which was launched in March 2025 and already has a published implementation roadmap. Where the 2025-2030 Strategy set broad direction, this newer draft policy is a more detailed institutional-design document: it proposes how AI governance would actually be structured and administered, not how AI itself would be regulated by statute. Public consultation on the draft opened on 21 July 2026 and closed on 4 August 2026; as of this writing it remains a draft, expected to move to Cabinet for consideration next, and has not been finalised or gazetted.

What the draft proposes

Reporting on the draft describes a four-tier governance structure: a National AI Steering Committee at the top, a central regulatory council beneath it, a proposed Kenya AI Safety Institute, and an AI systems registry. This is an institutional and administrative architecture rather than a set of enforceable rights and obligations. We were not able to independently verify the draft’s exact wording directly from the ministry’s own PDF, since the source document could not be retrieved during this research; the description above rests on the Ministry’s own consultation page and corroborating coverage from established trackers and Kenyan technology press, and should be treated as reported detail on a document still subject to revision rather than settled policy.

Why this matters even though it is non-binding

A draft policy carries no legal force on its own, but it is where government typically signals which institutions it intends to build and which powers it intends to hand them, before those choices are translated into statute. For a technology company trying to anticipate Kenya’s regulatory direction, the proposed AI Safety Institute and systems registry are worth watching closely: if either is carried through into the Artificial Intelligence Bill or a successor bill, it would materially shape what compliance actually looks like in practice, well beyond what the Bill’s current text says on its own.

What “policy before law” typically means in Kenyan practice

Kenya has a consistent pattern of using non-binding policy documents to work out institutional design before committing it to statute, and this draft fits that pattern closely. A policy document lets government consult more informally, test proposed structures like a dedicated safety institute against stakeholder feedback, and revise before the harder process of drafting binding legislative text begins. The trade-off is that a business cannot rely on anything in the draft as enforceable, and the eventual statutory version, whether folded into the Artificial Intelligence Bill or a separate instrument, may look quite different from what the July 2026 draft currently proposes. Treat the draft as a strong signal of institutional direction rather than a preview of specific compliance obligations.

How this relates to the AI Bill before the Senate

This policy process is running in parallel with, and is reportedly intended to complement, the Artificial Intelligence Bill, 2026 currently before the Senate, which we cover separately in The Artificial Intelligence Bill, 2026: What Kenya’s Proposed AI Law Would Actually Require. The two processes sit in different ministries and different arms of government, a Bill in Parliament and a policy in the Executive, and at least one civil-society submission on the Bill has specifically flagged the risk of the two proceeding without proper coordination between them. A business assessing regulatory risk should track the policy and the Bill as two separate, moving pieces, not assume that one supersedes or restates the other.