Report finds citizens seeking records to challenge administrative decisions, contest employment actions, or enforce socio-economic rights experience multi-year delays /AI illustration Public bodies are routinely breaching the 21-day statutory deadline for responding to access-to-information requests, with delays stretching up to two and a half years, a report has found.
The research report, titled ‘Between Principle and Practice: An Analysis of Kenya's Commission on Administrative Justice Rulings on Access to Information’, was published by the Data Privacy and Governance Society of Kenya.
Analysing written CAJ determinations from October 2022 to March 2026, the study found that delays of 16 to 30 months recur routinely, highlighting a growing gap between constitutional guarantees and the reality citizens face when requesting government-held information.
“Across the cases reviewed, public bodies repeatedly breached this obligation without consequence,” the report states, referring to Section 9(4) of the Access to Information Act, which requires an information access officer to respond within 21 days.
In many cases, state entities failed even to acknowledge receipt of initial requests or subsequent administrative appeals until the CAJ intervened with formal summonses or enquiries.
In ‘Steve Mandela v Wasreb’ (2025), the Water Services Regulatory Board failed for nearly 16 months to acknowledge a complaint regarding billing malpractices by the Malindi Water and Sewerage Company.
Wasreb provided substantive feedback only after the CAJ issued a summons and demanded an official institutional report.
The report notes that such protracted non-responsiveness effectively functions as a denial of rights. For citizens seeking records to challenge administrative decisions, contest employment actions, or enforce socio-economic rights, multi-year delays render the information practically useless.
Identifying institutional capacity deficits as a primary engine behind these compliance failures, the study notes that many public institutions operate with fragmented, paper-based files, lack systematic file-numbering protocols, and employ no dedicated or trained ATI officers. Consequently, routine information requests require manual searches that under-resourced or indifferent agencies readily deprioritise.
The report also details how public entities attempt to evade disclosure by pleading that requested records do not exist in an aggregated format.
In ‘Saddam Amatonyo v State Department for Basic Education’ (2026), the ministry failed to respond to a request for public school capitation-fund disbursement data, later arguing it did not hold the records as a centralised dataset. The CAJ rejected this defence, ruling that statutory reporting duties under the Public Finance Management Act legally obligate the department to hold and maintain those financial records.
Likewise, in ‘Wycliffe Asalwa Salano v Kenya Railways’ (2026), Kenya Railways refused to confirm or deny the existence of level-crossing safety registers.
The Commission inferred the records' existence from general operational record-keeping duties and ordered immediate access under the threat of criminal prosecution recommendations.
While Article 35 of the 2010 Constitution guarantees the right to information, oversight mechanisms face enforcement bottlenecks.
The report emphasises that while the CAJ routinely threatens criminal prosecution under Section 28 of the ATI Act, compliance tracking remains opaque, and financial penalties are rarely levied.
The root causes are institutional, not legal. The report identifies poor file-numbering, undigitised paper records and a lack of trained information access officers, noting: “This echoes the capacity deficits Article 19 and the CAJ identified through their joint sensitisation programmes”. The CAJ recorded only 71 complaints between 2016 and 2018, reflecting low public awareness and thin duty-bearer capacity rather than an absence of disputes.
Yet the report is careful to acknowledge the CAJ’s doctrinal achievements.
The Commission has clarified the “held test” governing format requests, expanded what counts as “held” information, imported a constitutional proportionality test favouring redaction over categorical refusal and extended the definition of “relevant private body” to include banks, public-benefit organisations, and trade unions.
In ‘Fred Apima v Deputy Registrar’ (2026), however, the Commission treated typed certified copies as sufficient where verbatim transcripts were sought.
“A verbatim transcript captures tone, hesitation, and non-verbal indications that a typed record necessarily loses,” the report observes, warning that the ruling “effectively allows an institution to choose the less informative format and treat that choice as dispositive, provided it actually maintains that format”.
The deeper problem, the report argues, is that “this doctrinal sophistication coexists with and is partly undermined by the same systemic non-responsiveness civil society was documenting as early as 2020”.
Not every case fits this pattern.
“‘Clauder Musi v National Syndemic Disease Control’ (2026) was resolved in 46 days where records were already organised, confirming that the delays documented elsewhere reflect identifiable capacity failures rather than any structural unworkability in the Act’s timelines,” the report notes.
The report recommends six key reforms: a defined, resource-proportionate practicability standard for format conversion; binding minimum standards for institutional record-keeping; codified, standardised criteria for compensation; a concrete proactive-disclosure hierarchy; Commission-issued proportionality guidelines; and a public compliance-tracking mechanism.
“The path forward lies in the reforms this report recommends: a defined, resource-proportionate practicability standard for format conversion; binding minimum standards for institutional record-keeping; codified, standardised criteria for compensation under Section 23(2)(b), so that Kuppet becomes the norm rather than the exception; a concrete proactive-disclosure hierarchy; Commission-issued proportionality guidelines; and a public compliance-tracking mechanism,” it concludes.
The report’s ultimate ambition is institutional transformation: “With it, the Commission could evolve from an interpreter of access rights into the enforcer of a transformative transparency regime, one capable of reshaping how public institutions and private bodies alike exercise power over information and public resources."
