As East Africa solidifies its position as a dynamic digital market, business leaders, technology pioneers and legal experts at the inaugural Bowmans X Tech event in Nairobi called for tighter collaboration between innovators and regulators.
Opening the event, Nairobi-based John Syekei, Bowmans’ co-head of Technology, noted that technology, from AI to cloud services, was an essential building block for businesses of all sizes.
As these businesses begin to scale, bringing stakeholders together across business, law, and investment is essential to examine the regulatory developments influencing the region’s digital economy.
‘The future of business in East Africa is being written at the intersection of technology and the law,’ he said.
Scale
Stephen Chege, Group Chief Corporate and External Affairs Officer at Safaricom, noted in his keynote that scale means taking an idea born in East Africa and transforming it for the world.
‘The size of your market is no longer determined by your population. It is determined by your ability to solve problems. Period.’ Chege said.
For example, ‘M-Pesa processed 46 billion transactions during the last year, serving over 41 million active customers and facilitating transactions exceeding USD 316 billion, that is KSH42 trillion. This is approximately USD 865 million dollars a day. That is scale,’ he said.
Chege stressed that success requires connecting markets: ‘It is Kenya connected to Uganda, connected to Tanzania, connected to Rwanda, connected to Ethiopia, and so on.’
Addressing cross-border scaling, Bowmans partner Robby Coelho explained that while technology creates borderless opportunities, laws and regulators remain local. Successful expansion requires connecting advice and best practices across jurisdictions.
Coelho added that technology also has different implications across industries: ‘Technology means something different in a bank than it does in a hospital, a mine, a retailer or a telecommunications company. We believe legal advice has to reflect that.’
Coelho outlined Bowmans’ new multi-disciplinary approach to digital innovation – Bowmans X Tech- a firm-wide approach to technology-related work in every sector.
‘It brings together the right legal, sector and market expertise around what each client wants to achieve – the client’s opportunity or challenge determines the team,’ he explained.
Digital ecosystem
Safaricom’s Director of Regulatory and Public Policy, Fred Waithaka, described the digital ecosystem as ‘like a living organism that is both local and international but deeply interconnected…. You have the platform layer that determines how content will be created, distributed and moderated. You have the connectivity layer … the active and passive elements and bandwidth ... [and] people at the heart of it.’
To protect and sustain this complex ecosystem, panellists at the event outlined a comprehensive roadmap for long-term resilience, noting that tech businesses must combine innovation, legal risk management and regulatory engagement at the same time rather than sequentially.
Key takeaways from the various panels included that:
- Companies must govern AI before they scale by adopting a risk-based approach. This includes establishing clear internal governance frameworks, building data discipline, managing ‘shadow AI’, protecting confidentiality and legal privilege against public-facing tools, and embedding compliance directly into product design, while maintaining critical human oversight.
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The focus must also be on building the physical rails of the digital economy. Fibre, towers, data centre power and land access must be prioritised, alongside balancing content moderation, privacy rights and the complexities of regional regulatory fragmentation.
- To avoid disputes down the line, companies should protect assets early by using confidentiality clauses, non-disclosure agreements, restrictive covenants and trade secret audits.
- They should also secure clear chains of title, establish proper transfer pricing and tax structures early, and map AI and data use cases, such as mitigating bias in digital finance.
Guardrails
Heather Irvine, Bowmans’ co-head of Technology based in Johannesburg said that as lawyers advise clients through mass AI adoption, structuring complex intellectual property assets, and modernising digital finance and payment systems ‘Our primary hurdle isn’t entrepreneurial vision, it’s mitigating the friction of fragmented tax regimes, exchange controls, and misaligned compliance models.’
Irvine noted, ‘Active collaboration between policymakers and the tech community will be what ensures that regulatory guardrails support, rather than obstruct, a thriving, inclusive digital ecosystem across East Africa.’
Chege reiterated that the objective should not be to regulate innovation out of existence. Rather, ‘it should be to create guardrails that allow innovation to grow responsibly… not by preventing innovation, but by creating the conditions under which innovations can be trusted and can be scaled.’