A donor-conceived person may grow up unaware of inherited risks like heart disease or certain cancers because donor identity is kept private, while the probability of half-siblings forming relationships is no longer a plot for a soap opera, but a statistical reality.
Kenya’s fertility industry has operated in a legal vacuum for years, allowing high-end Nairobi clinics to run sperm and egg donation programmes with little oversight and almost no accountability to the children those programmes produce. That is now changing. The Assisted Reproductive Technology (ART) Bill, 2022, passed the National Assembly on 11 November 2025 and is currently before the Senate, where it faces its final hurdle before presidential assent.
The bill, sponsored by Suba North MP Millie Odhiambo, would establish the country’s first comprehensive legal framework for IVF, surrogacy, gamete donation and embryo storage. It creates an ART Directorate to license clinics, caps the number of children a single donor may produce at ten, bans commercial surrogacy, prohibits the sale of gametes, and establishes a national donor registry.
It also grants donor-conceived persons limited rights to information about their origins, though full donor identity remains protected under the current bill. Only non-identifying information is accessible, and only to those who have reached adulthood. If passed, Kenya would become one of the few African nations with a comprehensive assisted reproduction law, setting a potential continental example.
At the centre of this debate is a question that is both deeply personal and increasingly urgent: is a donor’s right to anonymity more important than a child’s right to understand their own medical and family history? For years, clinics have treated the whole process more like a business deal than the birth of a human being. That framing, critics argue, has produced a generation of children whose biological history is considered legally off-limits, even to themselves.
In Kenya, the number of children born through assisted reproduction has grown steadily
Wanjiku, a 24-year-old student, thought she knew her family tree until she tried a home DNA kit. What should have been a moment of curiosity became something far more unsettling. Her results pointed to a biological origin her family had never disclosed. It was not just a surprise; it felt as if someone had stolen her life story and replaced it with a clinical “No Comment.” Her experience is far from unique. In Kenya, where one in three couples struggles with infertility, the number of children born through assisted reproduction has grown steadily, in an industry that until now has had no binding rules governing what those children may ever be told.
In Kenyan culture, knowing your people is not a footnote. It is your entire identity: the map of your clan, your land and your roots. Your name and your family line function as a social GPS, telling others who you are and where you belong. By treating donation as a confidential transaction, the system has been saying, in effect, that the secret is worth more than the human being’s right to know their own face.
Global data from the 2019 We Are Donor Conceived survey captures the scale of the emotional and medical stakes. Eighty-one per cent of donor-conceived individuals say they often wonder about the inherited traits, skills and physical likenesses they share with their donors, while 77 per cent live with persistent anxiety about having an incomplete medical family history.
The 2020 survey adds further weight: 70 per cent of respondents believe they were harmed by not knowing their donor’s identity, and 80 per cent believe they were harmed by not knowing the donor’s medical history. These are not abstract concerns. Without access to a biological parent’s records, a donor-conceived person may have no warning of a hereditary predisposition to heart disease or certain cancers, and no way to flag it to their own doctors. It is the equivalent of buying a complex piece of technology and being denied the manual.
Persons aged 18 and above would request info on whether they were conceived through ART
This is one reason why the absence of regulation is not merely a procedural gap. It is a public health risk. Under the current unregulated environment, a donor’s records may be held only by the clinic that recruited him, stored without any legal obligation for a minimum period, and shared with no one. If passed, the bill would require records to be preserved for 25 years, a provision that may prove as important to future generations as any other clause in the legislation.
The bill attempts to address identity concerns through a national registry. Persons aged 18 and above would be able to request information on whether they were conceived through ART and to check whether a proposed marriage partner might be a biological relative. Full donor identity, however, remains anonymous under the bill as currently drafted.
Some advocates argue that Kenya should go further and adopt an Open Identity model, under which donors agree upfront to be identifiable once the offspring reaches adulthood. Critics of this approach warn that it would shrink the donor pool. International evidence, however, suggests the opposite: open identity systems tend to attract a different, more mature demographic of donors who view the act as a long-term human contribution rather than a short-term financial arrangement.
That anonymity provision sits uneasily alongside one of the Senate debate’s most visceral concerns: accidental consanguinity. In a concentrated urban centre like Nairobi, where young male donors, predominantly university students, are reportedly paid between Ksh5,000 and Ksh15,000 per session, a single prolific donor could father dozens of children within overlapping social and geographic circles. Without a cap on how many families a donor may assist, the probability of half-siblings unknowingly meeting and forming relationships is no longer a dramatic hypothetical. It is a statistical risk. The bill’s cap of ten children per donor, if enforced, would significantly reduce that risk. Without a national registry and strict enforcement, however, a cap on paper is not a cap in practice.
Does a 21-year-old struggling with university fees truly grasp the lifelong implications of his sperm donation?
There is a further dimension to this recruitment pattern that the bill must grapple with: informed consent. Does a 21-year-old man, struggling to pay his tuition at a Nairobi university, truly grasp the lifelong implications of his donation? The emotional, legal and relational consequences of fathering ten or more children, none of whom he will know, are easily communicated in a clinic waiting room. A regulatory framework that protects only the transaction, without ensuring genuine understanding on the donor’s part, is ethically incomplete.
Legal expert and bioethicist Ayieta Lumbasyo, representing the Nairobi IVF Centre, addressed the bill’s complexity during a Citizen TV interview. She called for a robust regulatory framework that goes beyond clinic licensing, emphasising the urgent need for clear rules on donor anonymity, the protection of surrogate mothers, and the ethical limits of genetic selection.
She was particularly pointed on the use of Pre-implantation Genetic Diagnosis (PGD), the process by which embryos are screened before implantation. While PGD has legitimate medical applications, including the detection of hereditary diseases, Lumbasyo warned against its use for sex selection or other practices that edge toward so-called designer baby territory. The bill, as passed by the National Assembly, prohibits sex selection except for medically justifiable reasons.
The bioethical framework underpinning this debate is sometimes described as the ART Triangle: the intended parents, driven by the desire for a child and protected by the right to family privacy; the donor, guaranteed anonymity to shield against future legal or financial claims; and the offspring, the only party who did not consent to the arrangement, yet the one most profoundly shaped by its terms. Critics of full anonymity argue the triangle, as currently weighted, protects adults at the expense of children.
Clinics peddling anonymity as a guarantee are selling a product they can no longer deliver
Kenya is not legislating in isolation. Germany bans surrogacy entirely. The UK and Canada prohibit payment to donors and give donor-conceived individuals the right to identify their donor at age 18. The United States allows payment and treats anonymity as optional. Spain permits compensation but enforces strict anonymity. Kenya’s bill, if passed in its current form, sits closer to the altruistic and anonymous end of that spectrum, a deliberate if contested choice. What sets it apart from the unregulated status quo is not yet openness, but at least the beginning of structure.
One argument that deserves more prominence in the Senate debate than it has so far received is that anonymity, as a concept, is already functionally obsolete. In 2026, global DNA databases and digital genealogy tools mean that a donor’s identity can be traced with relative ease by anyone motivated to find it. Clinics that continue to sell anonymity as a guarantee are, in effect, selling a product they can no longer deliver. That is not only an ethical failure; it is a misrepresentation to every party in the arrangement, including the donor himself.
What the ART Bill offers, in place of that fiction, is a legal foundation: a registry, a donor cap, a licensing regime, a preservation requirement for records and the beginning of a child’s right to ask questions about their own origins. It does not yet offer full answers. A child is not a commodity to be manufactured in a legal vacuum. They are a person with a past that informs their future, and their right to know their own story is not a courtesy to be dispensed at a clinic’s discretion. It is a sovereign right.
For years, Kenya’s donor-conceived children have grown up with a blank space where half their biological history should be. Science provided the tools to bring them into the world. The question now before the Senate is what obligations that act of creation carries, and to whom those obligations are finally owed.
Dr Madeline Iseren is a pharmacist who comments on topical health and medical issues.
