Article 54 of the Constitution of Kenya, 2010 is unambiguous: persons with disabilities have the right to access educational institutions, facilities, and services; to reasonable accommodation; and to use sign language, Braille, and other forms of communication (Republic of Kenya 2010, art. 54). The constitution does not frame these as aspirations. It frames them as rights. The gap between that text and the lived experience of persons with disabilities navigating Kenya's public systems is not primarily a legal problem. It is a design problem.
The Gap in the Literature
Scholarship on digital accessibility in sub-Saharan Africa has grown substantially since the adoption of the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (United Nations 2006), focusing primarily on physical built-environment access and, to a lesser extent, on web content accessibility standards (Mdeliberately et al. 2021). What receives far less attention is the specific intersection of digital inaccessibility and financial exclusion for persons with mobility impairments in Kenya — where the inaccessibility of digital systems is not a secondary inconvenience but the primary barrier, given that physical access to service points is itself frequently impossible. This article addresses that intersection.
The Financial Exclusion Design Pattern
Consider what it means, in practice, to have severe mobility impairment and to need to conduct routine banking in Kenya. Most banks still require physical branch presence for account operations, signature-based transaction authorisation, and identity verification processes that assume the customer can arrive, sign, and present documents in person. For a person who cannot physically visit a branch — due to inaccessible transport, inaccessible premises, or the physical impossibility of producing a wet signature — the workaround is to appoint a legal representative: to give another person legal authority over your financial life, not because you lack mental capacity, but because the system was built as if you did not exist (Persons with Disabilities Act 2003, Cap 133).
According to the 2019 KNBS disability census, over 900,000 Kenyans have a severe disability (Kenya National Bureau of Statistics 2019). The Central Bank of Kenya's digital banking frameworks have moved toward remote account management, but implementation is uneven and the assumption of physical presence persists in too many institutions and processes (Central Bank of Kenya 2022).
When the system requires you to route your agency through someone else, it is not solving a problem. It is becoming one.
How South Africa Closed a Version of This Gap
South Africa offers the most directly applicable precedent in the region. The South African National Standard SANS 1796, derived from WCAG 2.1 and adopted formally as guidance for the State Information Technology Agency, requires that government digital services meet defined accessibility criteria as a condition tied to public-sector procurement (South African Bureau of Standards 2016). The mechanism is not advisory; it is procedural. An inaccessible bid is a non-compliant bid.
Kenya's ICT Authority has published accessibility guidelines technically comparable to SANS 1796 in content (ICT Authority Kenya 2022). What Kenya has not yet done is the procedural step South Africa took: writing those guidelines into the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act's technical evaluation criteria, so that an inaccessible system fails procurement rather than being regretted after deployment. The limitation of the South African model is candid: compliance enforcement remains weak, and a 2023 audit found significant non-compliance even within mandated government systems — confirming that a standard without an audit cycle is not a standard in practice (Disability World 2026).
Three Steps Available Now
First, the Kenya ICT Authority's existing accessibility guidelines can be formally incorporated, by ministerial directive, into the technical evaluation criteria under the Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act for any digital public service tender — converting guidance into a binding bid requirement without new primary legislation (Public Procurement and Asset Disposal Act 2015).
Second, the Central Bank of Kenya can require, as a condition of digital banking licence renewal, that banks publish and maintain a remote account-access pathway that does not require a wet signature or branch presence.
Third, the Huduma Centre network can pilot, in two counties within the next reporting cycle, a structured home-visit ID renewal service for registered persons with severe mobility impairment, using existing community health promoter infrastructure.
The Global Disability Summit 2025, held in Berlin, concluded with renewed commitments to disability-inclusive design in digital systems (International Disability Alliance 2025). Kenya signed. The obligation now is to translate those commitments into procurement requirements, design standards, and audit mechanisms before another generation of systems is built around the same assumption of who the user is.