#TheYearAhead: Kenyan Gov’t moving from large scale acquisition of equipment to BYOD

The Kenyan Government is set to move away from the large scale acquisition of equipment to the implementation of a Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) scheme.

This announcement was made by Nyimbi Odero, Advisor, Innovation and Digitization at Ministry of ICT, Kenya, who was Speaking at The Year Ahead conference organised by CIO East Africa, where he made it clear that the Kenyan Government will be moving to a Bring Your Own Device scheme for its civil servants.

“So what we can do is subsidize the procurement of things like laptops, because as a civil servant there is no way you are going to use the device only for work, and when you take it home your family is going to use it, and if it belongs to government it’s generally bad news. It is better that you own the device, look after it better, legitimately let your family use it and also do government work. Than for us to go ahead and buy new laptops,” said Odero.

“So it does mean that right now, out of peoples’ payroll and a bit of subsidies there is actually sufficient funds to go out and buy laptops that people need, and to continuously replace them. But we don’t want to go out and announce that we are going to charge every civil servant a thousand (Ksh) every month for a laptop he/she might claim they don’t need. But certainly this is the way it is going to happen, because nobody is going to go and buy a laptop or desktop anymore,” he continued.

Odero further added that this will intern provides an opportunity for; business sector, financiers and device manufacturers to work with the civil servants in order to help them to acquire devices.

According to Karien Bornheim, Owner, Footprint Africa Business Solutions (FABS), who was presenting about enterprise mobility at the same event, a good BYOD policy must protect privacy concerns for both employee and employer. She added that some of the considerations of such a policy would include:

An acceptable use policy, a social media policy, types of data allowed, whether the device is locked or the data is deleted, clear separation between personal and business data and regular monitoring.

Follow @CIOEastAfrica or #TheYearAhead  on Twitter to get more information on the recently concluded event.