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Internet shutdowns cost Kenya $75 million (Sh9.6 billion) last year, as President William Ruto's government cracked the whip on online freedoms to control the flow of information and dissent among Kenyans.
This amount is more than double the losses the country suffered in 2023 due to such similar shutdowns.
According to Top10VPN, an internet privacy, security, and review company, this is the result of more hours of internet shutdowns recorded in the country in June and November.
Internet rights organization NetBlocks calculates the cost of such shutdowns based on indicators from the World Bank and the International Telecommunications Union (ITU), which estimate in monetary terms the economic benefits generated in a country by uninterrupted internet and social media use.
In 2024, Kenya experienced two internet outages that lasted 511 hours and affected 22.7 million people, resulting in a cumulative loss of about $75 million, more than double the $27 million (Sh3.5 billion) lost in 2023, according to the latest data.
The first nationwide internet outage occurred on June 25, when Gen Z protesters stormed and occupied parliament buildings in protest of the 2024 Finance Bill.
NetBlocks confirmed the shutdown, which lasted about seven hours and cost the country about $4 million in lost output.
The government also restricted access to Telegram for 21 days in November during the national secondary school exams in an attempt to curb cheating, resulting in about $71 million in lost output.
It was the second year in a row that the government restricted the use of Telegram, having done so in 2023 for eight days during the same period when students sat for their final secondary school national examinations that year.
For every day that Telegram was inaccessible, businesses and the country lost an estimated $3.4 million (Sh537 million at the exchange rate at the time) in lost sales, wages, and economic benefits estimated to be derived from the use of the social media app.
Telegram an instant message platform mostly used for sharing large multimedia files is one of the most [popular social media platforms in Kenya and in the world with an estimated 800 million daily active users according to data firm Statista.
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