CA to launch campaign on child online protection before month’s end

Patricia Muchiri, CA’s Asst. Director Consumer Affairs, during the opening day of ICT Week

The Communications Authority of Kenya is set to launch an awareness campaign, before the end of the month, to help protect the country’s children when they go online.

The announcement was made by Patricia Muchiri, CA Assitant Director of Consumer Affairs, during the opening day of the ICT week. Held at the Sarova Panafric hotel, she let it be known that the authority was going out of its way in this endevour as protecting children is not their mandate.

“As some of you may know Communications Authority of Kenya is not actually the principal agency responsible for matters child protection in Kenya there is a national children’s secretariat under the ministry of labor that is responsible of all manners of the issues dealing with child protection,” Muchiri said.

Muchiri also informed attendees that the authority would be working in partnership with various organizations to help them in launching the campaign.

“As an agency we’ve taken initiative because we’ve realized that some of the things that happen over uphold the children who work in an environment that is protected and that has rules that are imposable,” she added. “So what we’ve done as a regulator; we’ve brought together several players, among them are UNICEF, we’ve brought on board the operators, we’ve brought onboard different NGO’s (that are very active in child issues) and we’ve designed a campaign, an awareness campaign, on matters to do with child online protection. And we are about to launch this campaign, probably in the next two weeks or so, by mid June you will see us in a lot of the media.”

The main elements of this campaign are based on thematic areas and pornography or inappropriate content as we call it is one of the thematic areas of this campaign.

The event, the second of its kind, was opened by, Dr Fred Matiang’i, Cabinet Secretary, Ministry of ICT, who talked about the importance of the meeting to Kenya’s ICT sector.

The annual event provides an opportunity for the industry and the regulator to engage on issues affecting the ICT sector and chart pathways for moving the sector forward.