The State Department for ICT and The Digital Economy has won the Smart Gigacity Excellence Award at the World Broadband Association (WBBA) Broadband Excellence Awards 2026.
The award, announced last week in Vienna, Austria was selected from an international shortlist of telecommunications operators and government ministries and it recognizes Konza Technopolis – Africa’s first smart city driven by AI-powered infrastructure and cloud computing, which has been developed by the Technopolis Development Authority (TDA), as a global model for gigabit-enabled urban development, where ubiquitous high-capacity connectivity, artificial intelligence and digital public infrastructure are combined to run a city and deliver services to its residents and businesses.
Commissioned in October 2025, Konza is Kenya’s Vision 2030 flagship city and now serves as the physical home of the country’s digital government.
The award was received by the Deputy Head of Mission at the Kenya Embassy and Permanent Mission in Vienna, Austria, Valerie Rugene on behalf of the Principal Secretary for ICT and the Digital Economy, Eng. John Tanui.
Rugene said the award was not just an honour, but a call to accelerate completion of Konza’s journey and share a practical, replicable model with cities across Africa.
“Kenya accepts this honour not as the completion of Konza’s journey, but as a call to accelerate it and to share a practical, replicable model with cities across Africa,” she said, inviting partners worldwide to join Kenya in building cities that are intelligent, sustainable, inclusive and human-centred.
Konza City is built with fibre at its foundation. A 79-kilometre city-wide fibre backbone connects businesses, institutions and homes, while public Wi-Fi and 141 smart poles fitted with CCTV and environmental sensors feed the city’s Intelligent Operations Centre, enabling real-time monitoring and faster response.
Operating as a live digital twin, the Centre brings 600 cameras and 12 Intelligent Transportation System sites under unified AI command, helping operators anticipate congestion, incidents and outages before they occur.
The city also integrates smart drainage, a wastewater reclamation facility that recycles up to 90 per cent of treated water, and an automated underground waste-collection system (the first in East and Central Africa), which moves 40 tonnes of waste daily through 14.8 kilometres of pipeline without collection trucks.
Konza Smart Energy supplies the city at 99.9 per cent reliability from a 120MW smart substation.
The Konza National Data Centre, one of Uptime Institute Tier III design-and-constructed certified facilities in Kenya, provides secure sovereign cloud and hosting services to government and local businesses, hosting over 100 public and private institutions.
The win places Kenya among the leading jurisdictions in broadband-led urban development and strengthens the country’s standing, as a destination for technology investment, data centre capacity and global business services.
Building on this recognition, the government is advancing the next phase of the Intelligent Operations Centre and a public-private partnership cloud expansion to bring more than 300 additional public institutions onto the Konza platform.
The World Broadband Association brings together operators, vendors, regulators and research institutions to advance broadband development worldwide.
Its annual Broadband Excellence Awards recognize outstanding achievement in network deployment, innovation and user experience.
Meanwhile, the State Department for ICT and The Digital Economy is implementing the government’s digital transformation agenda through the expansion of the national fibre network, digitization of public services, establishment of digital hubs and the development of digital skills and jobs for young Kenyans.
By Philip Onyango
