Information, Communication and the Digital Economy Cabinet Secretary (CS) Eliud Owalo has announced that the government intends to introduce a first-of-its-kind Virtual University in Kenya.

The university, which is set to be hosted in the Konza metropolis, will be established in line with the government's ambition of creating a digital superhighway to enable the seamless delivery of its services. 

While giving the ICT ministry's scorecard for the past year on Monday, Owalo said that the university will facilitate digital skilling and training for Kenyans to acquire optimal levels of ICT skills.

"We have also managed to operationalize the Kenya National Open University which is going to be a virtual university. I am happy to report that in a few days, the university will be officially commissioned by the President himself," he said. 

Through the Ajira Digital and Jitume programmes, Owalo said the government has secured a donation of 23,000 digital devices for deployment through stakeholder alliances with an intent to have a critical mass of Kenyans acquire ICT skills and also create jobs.

"We have gone ahead to deploy a total of 6,700 devices in 77 TVETs', four universities which have received 400 units each, 21 schools which have received 100 virtual desktops each and 100 in 8 integral ministries and agencies. We have also gone ahead and launched 34 sites," he said. 

So far the programmes have created a total of 109 digital jobs and trained 336,000 youths.

Having achieved effective sensitization and training, Owalo said that the skills will be channeled to the market sector through digital entrepreneurship.

He said that this will enable Kenyans to access government services through smartphone devices, which has already been identified as a gap in the market.

Owalo, therefore, noted that the nation will embark on locally assembling smartphones, and the first batch will be rolled out in the next one month, retailing at about Ksh.5,600.

"We have gone a step further to partner with the private sector to embark on the assembly of smart enables phones in the Kenyan market. We are going to be able to roll out cheap smart-enabled phones at a unit cost of about $40 (Ksh.5,600) within the next month," he said.

"We will subsequently move from local assembly to local manufacture of the handsets and we move to the next level of local manufacture of computers."

The ICT CS further noted that the nation is also taking the trajectory of embracing e-commerce and the government has already started taking advantage of the ICT infrastructure.

So far, he said, the government has installed 442 public WiFi hotspots, 22,000KM of fibre, 179 innovation hubs and 112 Jitume labs.

He went on to add that the government projects to digitalize all its services by the end of the year, and has so far onboarded 5,084 services while 2,550 have been partially effected.

Another 9,362 services have been identified that can be possibly digitalized, majorly focusing on Revenue collection, Transport, Education, border control and citizen services.