Govt to direct TV stations to increase local content to 60%

This was said by the Director General Communications Authority of Kenya (CA), Francis Wangusi during a press briefing that was held today at Ole Sereni where the Authority in consultation with key stakeholders subjected the Kenya Information and Communications (Amendment) Act draft regulations to public for consultations.

This was also part of a five-year strategic plan released by CA in 2013 that seeks to, among other things, increase the contribution of the ICT sector to the country’s gross domestic growth (GDP) by 100 per cent.

Wangusi also said as the regulator, they are set to increase this as promulgated by the Ministry of ICT. Currently, in terms of local content transmission, Citizen TV tops the list as the ratio of its local content to that of the total content stands at 38 per cent while Kiss TV’s local content transmission is quite low standing at just 18 per cent compared to its foreign programmes

However, with the new TV stations coming on board after the Digital Migration, the CA boss believes that the 60 per cent local content transmission by the local TV stations is achievable. In today’s sitting also the Authority in consultation with key stakeholders had suggested that for any content to be termed as local, 30 per cent of its productions should be owned by Kenyans.

Wangusi pointed out that as a country which is ahead of the curve across the region we should be in a position to produce local content that is not only consumable locally but can also be exported in other markets.

CA also looks into signing a MoU in two weeks’ time with the Competition Authority of Kenya to help deal with the competition matters in the sector whereby they will come up with an harmonized structure to determine who deals with what after investigations are carried out and also when it comes to consumer protection.

The Communications Authority of Kenya held its ICT regulations public consultations today. The regulator seeks to come up with new regulations that will align with the constitution as well as with the dynamic ICT sector it is therefore necessary to review the attendant regulations to ensure they reflect the developments.

The Kenya Information and Communications (Amendment) Act, 2013, was enacted in January 2014 and since then a lot of changes have taken place in the sector. The regulator looks at coming up with new regulations in the areas of cybercrime and cybersecurity, frequency spectrum, licencing and broadcasting.