Kenya’s Treasury has allocated Sh2 billion ($15.5 million) to build a disaster recovery centre for the Kenya Revenue Authority at Konza Technopolis, hardening the country’s tax infrastructure against cyberattacks and system failures.
The funding appears in the first supplementary budget for the financial year ending June 2026, tabled in Parliament by Treasury Cabinet Secretary John Mbadi. It covers both the acquisition of a new disaster recovery site and the upgrade of an existing ICT facility at Konza, located 60 kilometres southeast of Nairobi.
- KRA’s digital tax platforms process national filing, compliance monitoring, and payment transactions. A failure in primary systems would halt revenue collection across Kenya simultaneously, making backup infrastructure a fiscal necessity, not just an IT upgrade.
- Konza already hosts the National Data Centre (Phase 1) and other government digital infrastructure. Placing KRA’s recovery site there deepens the technopolis’s role as the backbone of Kenya’s e-government architecture.
- The supplementary allocation also includes funding for leasing motor vehicles to support KRA’s field enforcement and tax compliance operations.
- The investment coincides with KRA’s rollout of body-worn cameras for field officers, partly financed by the World Bank, which will also be backed by data centre infrastructure. KRA procured the cameras through a three-year contract with Chinese firm Nuctec Hong Kong Company.
- Kenya has been expanding digital tax tools rapidly: auto-populated VAT returns, the Electronic Rental Income Tax System, and the GAVA Connect platform for taxpayer services all concentrate critical revenue data in centralised systems that require resilient backup.
KRA collected Sh2.4 trillion in the financial year ending June 2025, and the government has set progressively higher targets as it works to reduce fiscal deficits without raising headline tax rates. The dependence on digital systems for that collection volume makes infrastructure resilience a matter of sovereign fiscal risk. Konza has received substantial public investment in recent years: Sh3.1 billion was allocated in the 2025/26 budget for data centre and smart city facilities, with an additional Sh2.3 billion for the Kenya Advanced Institute of Science and Technology on the same campus.
Bigger picture: Kenya is quietly building one of East Africa’s most concentrated digital government infrastructure clusters at Konza. The KRA recovery site adds a critical revenue dimension to what was previously framed mainly as a technology park and innovation hub. For institutional investors and technology firms eyeing the East African market, Konza is becoming the physical substrate of Kenya’s digital economy: government data centres, tax systems, cloud infrastructure, and a research university all on one campus. The Sh2 billion KRA investment is modest in isolation but material as a signal that Kenya is treating digital tax resilience as a budget line, not an afterthought.
Source: Business Daily Africa / Dawan Africa
