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Paper short abstract

A CDA of Kenya’s digital-skills policies and media narratives showing how state, donor, and corporate actors shape power, agency, and inequality, exposing gaps between empowerment claims and outcomes, and outlining how context-sensitive, just digital futures can be re-imagined.

Paper long abstract

Kenya’s “Silicon Savannah” agenda, aligned with regional and national digital plans, presents digital skills as a route to growth and inclusion. Yet upbeat promises sit beside rural–urban and gender gaps, English-first training, and insecure platform work, raising questions about who sets up the digital skilling agenda, who benefits, and why. This paper examines how policy and mainstream media frame communities, organise power, and match claims to results. Using a single-case design, the paper analyses 39 documents from the government, donors, private sector firms, civil society, and media using Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, guided by a three-layer framework that links structures, actors, and outcomes, and a focused power analysis. The findings show that: (1) communities are mostly portrayed as passive “beneficiaries” or a “talent pipeline,” not co-designers, thus obscuring grassroots agency; (2) agenda-setting power concentrates in government–donor–corporate coalitions while civil society occupies peripheral spaces; and (3) a persistent rhetoric–outcome disjuncture privileges numeric outputs over quality, equity, and decent work, particularly for women, rural youth, and persons with disabilities. The study advocates for participatory, multilingual, and context-sensitive models that centre local knowledge, open spaces for co-creation, and privilege decent work/labor protections, offering actionable implications for Kenyan ministries, donors, and industry partners.

Building on wider debates about decolonial development futures, the paper demonstrates that dominant narratives continue to reproduce structural inequalities while masking epistemic hierarchies embedded in donor- and corporate-led digital transformation, thus contributing to reimagining digital development in the Global South by foregrounding agency, justice, and context-sensitive governance of digital futures.