The State Department for ICT and the Digital Economy has won the Smart Gigacity Excellence Award at the World Broadband Association Broadband Excellence Awards 2026 at VIECON in Vienna, Austria.
Kenya’s entry was selected from an international shortlist of telecommunications operators and government ministries.
The award recognises Konza Technopolis: Africa’s first smart city driven by AI-powered infrastructure and cloud computing, 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.
It was received by Valerie Rugene, Ambassador and Deputy Head of Mission at the Kenya Embassy and Permanent Mission in Vienna.
She received it on behalf of the Principal Secretary for ICT and the Digital Economy, John Tanui.
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.
It hosts over 100 public and private institutions. At the same time, the Open University of Kenya, the Kenya Advanced Institute of Science and Technology and Riara University link education and research directly to enterprise and innovation and more than 1,000 affordable homes are under construction.
Accepting the award, Rugene conveyed appreciation to the World Broadband Association and its judging panel, and acknowledged the leadership of President William Samoei Ruto, the Cabinet Secretary for Information, Communications and the Digital Economy William Kabogo Gitau, the Technopolis Development Authority (TDA), and the partners, engineers and innovators behind the project.
“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.
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.
