As Kenya races to embrace artificial intelligence and expand digital access, children are entering an online world where the risks are evolving faster than the rules designed to protect them.
The warning comes as the United Nations calls for urgent action to protect children and young people from growing risks in the digital information environment, particularly those arising from artificial intelligence, social-media platforms and business models built around capturing attention and personal data.
For Kenya, the warning is particularly relevant.
The country has already established a legal and regulatory framework for protecting children online. The Children Act, 2022, explicitly recognises online abuse, including cyberbullying, grooming, solicitation, cyber harassment and cyberstalking, as offences. It also prohibits exposing children to emotionally traumatic and age-inappropriate content and protects them from exploitation through electronic and online platforms.
But artificial intelligence is rapidly changing the nature of those threats.
Generative AI can create convincing images, audio and video, manipulate information and make it easier to impersonate people. For children, the risks extend from exposure to harmful content and cyberbullying to privacy violations, online exploitation and the misuse of their images and personal information.
Kenya’s Communications Authority is already confronting some of these challenges. The regulator has developed Industry Guidelines for Child Online Protection and Safety covering ICT products and services that can be accessed or used by children. It is also undertaking a National Baseline Survey on Child Online Protection and Safety, in partnership with the University of Nairobi, to generate locally relevant evidence on children’s online experiences and the threats they face.
The survey could become particularly important as Kenya’s children spend more time learning, communicating and creating content online.
The Communications Authority has identified cyberbullying, exposure to harmful content and emerging online threats as areas requiring a more coordinated and evidence-driven response. The findings are expected to inform policy, resource allocation, enforcement and interventions aimed at creating safer digital environments for children.
Kenya has an AI strategy — but is child safety sufficiently central?
Kenya launched its Artificial Intelligence Strategy 2025–2030 in March 2025, setting out a national framework built around AI digital infrastructure, data and AI governance, and AI research, innovation and commercialisation. The strategy also includes governance, ethics, equity and inclusion among its cross-cutting priorities.
The challenge now is translating those broad commitments into safeguards that specifically protect children.
This matters because children are not merely consumers of technology. They are increasingly users of AI-powered search tools, educational platforms, social media, games and chatbots. AI systems can influence what they see, what information they encounter and, increasingly, how they interact with digital services.
UNICEF warns that AI systems can shape children’s digital experiences by recommending videos, articles, music and people to connect with, while creating new risks around privacy, safety, discrimination and exploitation.
Kenya therefore faces a policy question that goes beyond whether children should be allowed online.
The question is whether the digital services children use are being designed with children in mind.
From parental responsibility to platform responsibility
For years, online safety conversations have largely focused on parents: monitor children’s devices, limit screen time, teach them not to share personal information and encourage them to report abuse.
Those measures remain important, but the UN’s latest warning points to a bigger issue — the responsibility of companies whose platforms are designed to maximise engagement, collect data and keep users online.
Kenya’s Office of the Data Protection Commissioner has already issued guidance on processing children’s data, warning about risks including age-inappropriate content, cyberbullying and online predators. Its guidance calls for safeguards including parental consent where required, age verification, privacy-by-design, data minimisation and age-appropriate privacy settings.
This shifts part of the responsibility from the child and parent to the companies designing and operating digital platforms.
The question for Kenya is whether these safeguards are being effectively implemented — particularly as AI becomes embedded in products that children can access.
Children must also have a voice
There is another dimension to Kenya’s debate: children should not only be treated as potential victims of technology.
They are also users, creators, learners and participants in digital spaces.
UNICEF’s guidance on AI and children calls for children’s rights and participation to be incorporated into AI governance, alongside safety, privacy, non-discrimination, transparency and accountability.
Kenya’s policy discussions therefore need to ask children themselves what risks they encounter online, which platforms they use, how they respond to harmful content and what support they need.
That is one reason the Communications Authority’s national baseline survey is significant: locally generated evidence can help move the debate away from assumptions and toward the actual experiences of Kenyan children.
The regulatory window is narrowing
Kenya is not starting from zero. It has laws protecting children, a telecommunications regulator with specific child-online-protection guidelines, a data protection regulator and a national AI strategy.
But AI is developing faster than traditional regulatory cycles.
The danger is that Kenya could build an AI ecosystem first and attempt to retrofit child protection later.
The UN’s message is that this would be the wrong sequence.
For Kenya, the next phase of AI governance should therefore include a clear child-rights test: Can an AI system or digital platform be safely used by a child? What data does it collect? How does it determine a user’s age? What happens when a child encounters harmful content? Who is accountable when an automated system causes harm? And, crucially, can children themselves participate in shaping the rules that govern the technologies they increasingly depend on?
As Kenya positions itself as an African leader in artificial intelligence, those questions may prove just as important as the country’s ambitions for innovation.
The measure of a successful digital future may ultimately not be how quickly Kenya adopts AI, but how safely it does so for its youngest citizens.
