Kenya has spent US$ 450 Million on IT projects in the last two years

The money spent on IT projects in Kenya, by both large co-operations and SMEs in the last two years has been calculated to be in the tune of US$ 450 Million.

This was announced by Samuel Gicharu, CEO, Insight Wells, when giving a breakdown of the CIO survey, at the CIO 100 Symposium and Awards being held at Enashipai, Naivasha, Kenya.

According to Mr Gicharu the amount was divided into two sums, with the large corporations having spent the larger chunk of money.

“For large co-operations the amount we extrapolated was USD 350 million, which is in the last 2 years, the way the data was structured we weren’t able to break it down to annual, because there are projects that have been running for the last two year’s and for the small corporates was USD 100 million,” said Gicharu.

“It’s important to note how we arrived at this figure; we looked at the submissions that came through for CIO 100 2016, then we categorised into the two major categories, which was large corporates and small corporates,” he added.

According to Gicharu in their analysis SME’s were companies that had employee costs of between two and 100. The company then looked at the amount organisations in Kenya had invested in what they had submitted as innovative projects.

“So we used that number, and then we used the available information from the number of SME’s and large corporations in Kenya. There is no comprehensive study that has been done that can give an accurate figure of the number of large co-operations we have in Kenya, including the multinationals and SMEs, so we just used the available previous studies and we came up with an estimated figure of the organisations,”  he continued.

“What gave us the confidence to do that was because our survey was purely random, we were calling organisations randomly, that means, when you have a random set of Data and it is of a significant sample size, you can extrapolate with a calculated sample error. The figure we are talking about could be plus or minus a couple of million, but we feel that based on the approach we used it is a figure that falls within that area,” he added.

To the question, why only do the figure for Kenya? Gicharu responded by saying that the main challenge for getting to the rest of the region was low data as the data they collected for the rest of the region only reached 15%.

And to why the figure is important he said that it is important for vendors because they know it is the piece of cake they are chasing.