The Kenya National Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2023–2027 identifies multiple priority domains — healthcare, agriculture, education, public services (Republic of Kenya, Ministry of ICT 2023). The word "disability" does not appear in the published strategy. The Persons with Disabilities Act establishes rights to equal treatment, accessible services, and accommodation (Republic of Kenya 2003). It was drafted before artificial intelligence was a meaningful public policy category in Kenya. The result of these two silences — disability absent from AI policy, and AI absent from disability policy — is a policy architecture with a structural gap in which the population most affected by both domains is represented in neither.
The Gap in the Literature
The literature at the intersection of disability policy and AI governance is growing in OECD contexts, with particular attention to algorithmic discrimination in employment (Whittaker et al. 2019) and healthcare triage (Obermeyer et al. 2019). What is absent from this literature is systematic analysis of how this intersection manifests in countries where disability policy, AI governance, and technology procurement are developed in separate institutional silos with minimal coordination. Kenya is precisely such a context, and the consequences of that siloing are specific and documentable.
The Institutional Siloing Problem
In Kenya, disability policy sits primarily within the State Department for Social Protection; AI and technology policy within the Ministry of ICT, Innovation and Youth Affairs; health technology governance within the Ministry of Health and the KMPDC; and procurement standards within the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority. No formal coordination mechanism exists across these bodies for the specific purpose of ensuring that technology procured or deployed in public systems does not systematically disadvantage persons with disabilities. This is not a uniquely Kenyan problem, but it is one Kenya can solve with institutional design rather than legislative reform.
The Global Disability Summit 2025 committed signatory governments to "disability-inclusive digital transformation" — a commitment that is meaningless without a specified institutional owner for that transformation (International Disability Alliance 2025). Kenya signed. The question is which of its existing institutions can be designated as the coordination point.
Policy made in silos produces systems built in silos. The person navigating those systems does not experience them as separate; they experience them as one compound failure.
Rwanda's Disability Mainstreaming Approach
Rwanda offers the most relevant regional precedent for cross-sectoral disability policy integration. The National Council of Persons with Disabilities is granted statutory consultation rights in all government policy development processes — not as an optional engagement step but as a required procedural stage before major policies or programmes are finalised (Rwanda Governance Board 2021). The limitation is that this mechanism is not specifically adapted to AI or technology procurement: Rwanda's NCPD is a general disability policy body without the technical expertise to evaluate AI governance instruments. This is the specific gap Kenya can fill by creating a cross-sectoral technical working group with both disability rights representation and AI governance expertise — an institutional design solution rather than a legislative one.
Three Steps Available Now
First, the National Council for Persons with Disabilities can be formally designated, by executive circular, as a required consultee in the impact assessment process for any government AI or technology procurement above a defined threshold value — inserting disability perspective into procurement before systems are deployed.
Second, a joint technical working group comprising representatives of the NCPD, Ministry of ICT, Ministry of Health, and Public Procurement Regulatory Authority can be convened under existing inter-ministerial coordination mechanisms — requiring no new legislation, only a Cabinet directive.
Third, the National AI Strategy can be amended in its first scheduled review cycle to include a disability-inclusive AI annex, modelling the approach the EU AI Act uses for high-risk AI systems in healthcare and employment domains.