Kenya is to invite Chinese companies to be key investors in the planned setting up of light electronic manufacturing, the head of the government information communication technology development has said.

Permanent Secretary in the Ministry for Information and Communications Bitange Ndemo said the Kenya government is currently seeking credit from China to set up light electronic manufacturing plant in designated Special Economic Zones.

"If Treasury succeeds in getting the credit from China, we shall obviously work with Chinese companies. Chinese firms are likely to play a key role," Ndemo told Xinhua in an interview on Thursday.

Special Economic Zones (SEZ) were proposed and approved by the government to help stimulate industrialization in the rural areas.

They have special tax benefits like the Export Processing Zones (EPZS) that are by law required to export up to 80 percent of their products.

The SEZs program covers a wider range of allowable activities than the EPZs and is expected to be major drivers for the achievement of economic objectives and goals of Vision 2030 aiming to transform Kenya into a globally competitive country.

SEZs include the establishment of agricultural parks, industrial parks, science and technology parks for the development and production of information technology software and hardware products.

There have been proposals that EPZs should be converted into SEZs as it happened in Mauritius where they have been very successful, because they created additional job opportunities and eased technology transfer.

Chinese companies have played a key role in helping Kenya develop its ICT infrastructure with two Chinese Companies, ZTE and Huawei, which are involved in the laying of the National Optic Fibre Broadband Infrastructure.

Huawei, which has set up its regional headquarters in Kenya and runs an academy for electronic engineers in the Kenyan capital Nairobi, also built the CDMA network under the rural Telecommunications. "Treasury is now looking for the Chinese credit to roll out second phase of National Optic Fiber Broadband Infrastructure," he said.

The ICT projects undertaken by Chinese companies were supervised by the state-owned Telkom Kenya, a telecommunications company operating the Orange mobile telephone and data services jointly with France Telecom.

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