Over 28,000 .KE domain names were registered in 2016

This was said by Cabinet Secretary Ministry of ICT, Mr. Joe Mucheru as he gave his opening remarks at the opening of the ICANN Capacity Building Workshop for Africa Governmental Advisory Comittee (GAC) Representatives.

Quoting the recently released CA sector report for the first quarter of the financial year 2016/2017, Mucheru pointed out that mobile phone and data/internet penetration in Kenya stood at 87.3% and 85.3%, respectively while broadband penetration currently stood at 27%, and was increasing.

“This is an indicator of fast uptake and growing popularity in the use of the Internet. The .KE domain names have now reached 64,328. These may seem few compared to the bigger economies but looking back at 2003 when the ccTLD was re-delegated, and considering the trend over time, the popularity in use of .KE has increased tremendously,” added Mucheru.
He further added that the industry regulator, the Communications Authority of Kenya, through a Public Private Partnership (PPP) had continued to support the Kenya Network Information Centre (KeNIC), which is the country’s ccTLD registry.

“Some of you may recall that KeNIC is a model that has won worldwide recognition, and through it, Kenya has encouraged and supported other countries in Africa to set up their own ccTLD registries,” he said.

According to CA statistics, “.co.ke” (companies) had the highest share of the dot KE (.KE) domain names as at 30thSeptember 2016 with 56,568 companies having registered up from 53,990 companies in June to stand at 92.74 per cent while “.mobi.ke” recorded the lowest share at 0.08 per cent. Government agencies .GO.KE had 369 domain names while Non-Government Agencies “OR.KE” had 1,841 registered domains. Higher education institutions ” AC.KE” had 767 domains registered, Lower and Middle Level Institutions “.SC.KE” had 703 domains registered and Information “INFO.KE” had 138 domain names registered. Personal Websites and E-mail “.ME.KE” and “.NE.KE” had 355 and 210 registered domains respectively.

In a quest to get more compnies registered under .KE Domain name, KENIC had in July 2016 slashed the cost of acquiring the .ke domain by a third. The move by Kenic to slash the costs was part of efforts to get more than half of Kenyan enterprises on the country’s .ke domain name.

However, despite the growth in the number of domains quarter on quarter, Kenya still lags behind in terms of domain uptake. In the African continent, South Africa leads in terms of localized domains which stand at over one Million. There were also plans to give individual cities in South African their own domain identifiers owing to this popularity. South Africa is then followed by Nigeria and then Egypt.