Rosemary Kimwatu Koech, Head of Data Protection at KCB Bank Group, died at her home in Ngong on Friday morning.
She was a familiar name across Kenya’s technology, fintech, legal and data protection circles, and her death has left those communities reeling.
Her family has not released a cause of death, and the circumstances remain undisclosed.
A Career Built at the Crossroads of Law and Technology
Koech spent nearly two decades moving between law, public policy, technology and finance, and her focus sharpened over time on a single question: how should organisations collect, use and protect personal data. That question became her life’s work.
She joined KCB Bank Group in June 2022 as Data Protection Officer, arriving from Safaricom PLC, where she had served as Public Policy Manager. A year later, in June 2023, KCB promoted her to Head of Data Protection, putting her in charge of the Group’s data protection compliance. Announcing the Safaricom to KCB move on LinkedIn in 2022, she called it “a season of growth and transition” and said she was looking forward to the challenge ahead.
Before Safaricom, Koech had already built a reputation spanning legal and regulatory work in Kenya’s growing tech sector. She served as Head of Public Policy and Legal and Regulatory Specialist at Oxygène Marketing Communications, and held senior legal and regulatory posts at fintech firms WayaWaya and MODE. Her professional path started even earlier and further afield, in marketing, before she shifted into industrial relations and legal practice. She later worked as a Legal and Administrative Officer at Caritas Nairobi, a role that preceded her long run in the tech industry.
Beyond Her Day Job, a Voice in Kenya’s Digital Policy World
Koech’s reach extended well past KCB’s offices. At the time of her death, she sat on KICTANet’s Board of Trustees, served as a board member of the Association of Fintechs in Kenya, and held a director’s seat at KeNIC, the body that manages Kenya’s national internet domain. She chaired the Data Protection Working Group at the Kenya Bankers Association and volunteered on the operational board of Legal Hackers.
Within KICTANet specifically, she took on some of the organisation’s most demanding roles, including Principal of the Kenya School of Internet Governance and Chair of the Multistakeholder Advisory Groups for both the Kenya Internet Governance Forum and the East Africa IGF.
Those positions put her squarely in the middle of Kenya’s most consequential digital policy debates, from data protection and financial technology to internet governance, cybersecurity and regulation.
In a tribute published this week, KICTANet’s Board of Trustees, led by chair Ali Hussein, called her “a true advocate and champion for privacy and data governance in the digital economy,” pointing to her work at KCB as proof. The board also remembered her as a builder of connections across the industry, someone who reminded colleagues that lasting change grows out of partnership, and described her as a mentor and friend whose loss it feels deeply.
An Understanding of Regulation Shaped by Years in Industry
What set Koech apart was how naturally she moved between two worlds that rarely intersect easily: legal compliance and the fast pace of technology business. Her law background gave her a firm grip on regulation and governance, while her years inside telecom, fintech and banking companies gave her a practical sense of what digital transformation actually demands of an organisation.
That combination mattered increasingly as Kenya’s Data Protection Act took hold and companies scrambled to meet its requirements. At KCB, one of East Africa’s largest banking groups, she helped lead that effort from the inside. Through her work with KICTANet, the Kenya Bankers Association, the Association of Fintechs in Kenya and KeNIC, she also helped shape the conversations that brought technology companies, regulators and policymakers to the same table.
To many colleagues, she represented more than a job title. She was part of a generation of professionals who helped write the rules governing Kenya’s digital economy as it took shape.
Koech held a Bachelor of Laws degree from the University of Nairobi and an Advanced Diploma in Public Relations from the Chartered Institute of Public Relations. Her list of honours grew steadily over the years: CIO Africa named her to its inaugural Most Influential Women in Digital Transformation list in 2020, the International Legal Technology Association named her among its 2021 Influential Women in Legal Tech, and Africa Law Tech later recognised her as one of Africa’s leading women in legal innovation. The KICTANet board, in its tribute this week, went further still, calling her a genuine trailblazer both within Kenya and across the continent. Together, the recognitions point to a career that showed how far legal training could travel beyond the courtroom, into boardrooms shaping data policy across a continent.
Koech leaves behind a body of work centred on a simple idea: that innovation and the use of personal data must come paired with accountability, privacy and trust. Kenya’s technology and financial sectors, and the many people she mentored along the way, carry that idea forward.
