Safaricom in partnership with Cisco have officially launched a remote ehealth initiative. The ehealth program targets citizen in the rural areas and provides them access to quality health care, via Safaricom connectivity. The program will be rolled out in digital villages and requires minimal equipment to set up. Patients who would like to access the ehealth care service will visit the digital village in their locality. A community health worker at the digital village will enter the patient’s details into the system and diagnose vital signs. The patient will then be able to consult a doctor via video conference. This system is intended to save time and cost for the patient as they do not have to travel to major urban centres to consult a doctor. Payment for the service can be done via M-PESA.

Equity Bank’s innovation towards the citizens has seen the bank invest Ksh 8 billion in a modern data centre capable of handling 300,000 transactions per minute and hold information of up to 75 million cards. James Mwangi, Equity Bank CEO says the bank will be handing over management of the data centre to IBM who will in return offer its South African data centre as a disaster recovery centre for Equity's data centre. The Bank will also be setting up an innovation, incubation and acceleration centre targeting young Kenyans with innovative ideas. The centre will be hubbed to Equity’ Banks data centre. The bank also provides an agricultural insurance service that compensates farmers when foliage in an area falls below a set level due to drought. The foliage detection is provided through National Aeronautics and Space Administration satellite imagery.

The Government is pursuing several initiatives that will see it becoming more efficient in service delivery to its citizens. Ann Waiguru, Head of Governance at Treasury and Acting Director of Integrated Financial Management Information System (IFMIS) says that IFMIS will be rolled out to county levels by June next year and to the new ministries post 2012. IFMIS runs on the Government Common Core Network (GCCN) and is set to replace various stand alone software that treasury has been using. Waiguru says that treasury staff will be trained at the rate of four modules a year. The training will improve the end user experience which has been blamed for the failure of IFMIS in the last 2 years. The budget module of IFMIS will be piloted before the budget is read this year.

Other key highlights at the connected Kenya conference  include announcements by the ministry of lands permanent secretary, Dorothy Angote that the ministry was working on the Kenya Spatial Data Infrastructure database  that would be critical for planning purposes for various government ministries and agencies. The database would reduce planning time for projects such as road construction from several months to a few days. Jamii telecom general manager, John Kamau mentioned that Kenya was still utilizing less than 10% of its undersea cable capacity. Victor Kyalo Deputy CEO ICT board says that Kenya is in the process of establishing a cyber emergency response team (CERT). Kyalo says that 945 of 15000 sites using the Kenyan top country level domain had been hacked.