COUNTRY FOCUS: KENYA
Afya Rekod is currently in discussions
with various entities across governments
and developing partners to explore how
their efforts can be accelerated urgently
for COVID-19.
The platform presents a unique ability to
address critical emerging health needs
as it has a differentiated product that
is centred around the most important
entity in a health equation, a patient
which presents a rapidly growing
opportunity to launch an AI engine that
solves and helps the world prevent and
monitor the spread of global pandemics
like COVID-19. •
Kenya adopts cutting-edge
technology to fight economic fraud
Companies in Kenya continue
to adopt more cutting-edge
technology to fight the economic
impact of fraud.
According to a survey by global
audit firm PwC, Kenya lost Kes5.5
billion to economic fraud during a
24-month review. There were 5,000
plus respondents globally with 102
from Kenya and 58% reported they
experienced economic crimes in the
last 24 months, which is down from
75% reported in 2018. However, the
percentage is still higher than the world
average of 47%.
PwC said that the most common cases
of fraud were bribery and corruption,
procurement fraud, asset misappropriation
and customer fraud. And 36% of these
frauds are committed by internal people
in companies, while 32% was a collusion
between internal and external players and
27% were external players.
The survey said advanced technology
by itself was not sufficient to combat
economic crimes but companies also need
to invest in the right expertise, governance
structures and monitoring mechanisms.
The survey found that as organisations strive
to be more efficient and better serve an evergrowing
client base, they continuously adopt
more complex technology. As this happens,
attacks aimed at the systems or designed
to utilise these systems also become more
sophisticated in scale and methodology.
As such, organisations have no option but
to invest in ever more complex anti-fraud
technology. This unfortunately increases
the risk of the technology employed being
ineffective especially where knowledge of
how such technology works is limited to a
few individuals in the organisation.
There is also a risk that organisations will
erroneously assume that the technology
they have invested in, since advanced, can
in isolation of other measures, protect them
from fraud.
Although AI ranked lowest, it is widely seen
as the future in crime busting technology.
This is due to its ability to harness Big
Data and ability to augment the other
technologies and more traditional methods
of combating economic crimes. Of the
common AI technologies that also include
Natural Language Processing (NLP),
Natural Language Generation (NLG),
Voice Recognition and Machine Learning;
Kenyan respondents highlighted Biometric
Authentication as the most beneficial AI
technology with 34% of Kenyan respondents
installing and deriving value from it.
Biometric technology has been refined
over the past few years with deployment of
fingerprint readers and facial recognition
software improving tremendously. Smart
phone developers have been key in fast
tracking the development and widespread
use of this technology.
According to the survey’s respondents, cost,
limited resources to run/handle results and
lack of (appropriate) systems were the top
three reasons preventing their organisation
from implementing or upgrading technology
in order to combat fraud, corruption or
other economic crimes. Technology is
dynamic, changing every so often with new
developments every year.
In Africa, cybercrime ranks among the top
areas of concern with 38% of CEOs citing it
as a threat. •
44 INTELLIGENTCIO
www.intelligentcio.com