Gituro Wainaina

Professor, School of Business, University of Nairobi, Kenya

Kenya Vision 2030 is the national development blueprint that aims to transform Kenya into a newly industrializing, globally competitive and knowledge-based middle-income country, providing a high quality of life to all its citizens by 2030 in a clean and secure environment.  As Kenya, therefore, aims to become a globally competitive and knowledge-based economy in the fast changing business environment, knowledge management becomes a must for every sector in the process of gathering, managing and sharing employees’ knowledge capital in order to ensure organizational effectiveness and sustaining competitive differentiation.  The public sector in Kenya can leverage efficiencies through accessing the right information for making informed decisions and eliminate duplication of effort in delivering services to citizens at national level and more so that the county level.  In addition, public sector will have to leverage on knowledge for improving internal processes and formulation of sound government policies and programmes for efficient public service delivery for increased productivity. 

In the next five yeas 2018 to 2022, the Kenya Government is focusing on the ‘Big Four’ namely manufacturing; food security and nutrition; affordable health care; and affordable housing.  The aim of the Big Four is to create opportunities for economic growth which in turn will spur wealth creation.  The Government is committed to increasing manufacturing from 9.2% in 2017 to 20% of gross domestic product by 2022; adopting new and innovative initiatives that will drive 100 percent food and nutrition security commitment over the next five years; undertaking seven priority initiatives that will drive the metrics on providing one million homes programme; and executing five innovative initiatives that will ensure 100% universal health care by scaling up National Hospital and Insurance Fund uptake.  The successful implementation of the above initiatives and programs and consequently the realization of the Big Four will require a lot of levering on knowledge management.

Knowledge management will, therefore compliment the strategies by the government in realizing the Big Four.  By managing knowledge, the government can leverage efficiencies across all public services through accessing the right information for making informed decisions and eliminating duplication of effort.  Public sector in Kenya should strive to be ever more efficient and effective in order to deal with the constantly evolving needs of the citizens.  This is critical because increasingly citizens are demanding higher service quality.