The IBM Corporate Service Corps was launched in 2008 to help provide IBMers with high quality leadership development while delivering high quality problem solving for communities and organizations in emerging markets. They spent 3 months in Kenya and working with KENET in 2011.

The team of four senior employees of IBM coming from four different countries (China, Finland, Germany and Spain) arrived in Kenya on July 1, 2011 and started their work immediately after the launch. It was part of the IBM Corporate Social Responsibility to emerging economies. There were also two other IBM CSC teams in Kenya that were working with the directorate of E-government and with Ministry of Information and Communication.

The team was asked by KENET to provide pro bono consulting study that was aimed to develop strategies for increasing the research (and education) and local traffic coming out of the KENET network which was and is currently very low at less than 5% (most traffic is still to Google, Yahoo, and other non-research and education sites). They interviewed a representative number of VCs, ICT directors, faculty and researchers to establish the reasons that keep the research traffic relatively low and why researchers remain isolated from the Global Research and Innovation Networks despite the fact the Internet bandwidth has increased by a factor of more than 10 times in the past two years. They were also helping KENET and Universities ultimately, to benchmark themselves with other Research and Education Networks in terms of operations and organizational and governance structures.

IBM has prepared a  6 minute video of their 5-year anniversary and KENET is one of the success stories that are highlighted. See the video link