People

Bitange Ndemo is Kenya’s Ambassador to Belgium and Mission to the European Union. Prior to his new assignment, he was a Professor of Entrepreneurship at the University of Nairobi’s Faculty of Business and Management Sciences. His research centres on the link between ICTs and small and medium enterprises, emphasising how ICTs influence economic development in Africa.   He also served as the Chairman of the Kenya Distributed Ledgers and Artificial Intelligence Taskforce that developed a digital transformation roadmap. He is an advisor and Board member to several organisations, a member of the: MIT Artificial Intelligence Policy Forum (MIT AIPF) Panel member, OECD Expert Panel on Artificial Intelligence and Blockchain. Ndemo is a former Permanent Secretary of Kenya’s Ministry of Information and Communication in Kenya. He facilitated many transformative ICT projects, including the undersea cables, open data initiatives, and Silicon Savanah, a technology city under construction in Kenya. His other assignments include Senior Advisor to UN’s Global Pulse (Big Data initiatives), the UNCDF’s Better than Cash Alliance, and UNESCO’s Innovation Council. He is an Open Data/Big Data evangelist dedicated to simplifying (visualization) data for ordinary citizens to consume. He writes two columns every week for Business Daily and Nation online. He co-edited a book, Digital Kenya: An Entrepreneurial Revolution in the Making, with more than 350,000 downloads.