Registry entry

Kenya Application to Register a Company (Form CR1)

Kenya's Business Registration Service (BRS) Form CR1, "Application to Register a Company" (Section 13 of the Companies Act, 2015; prescribed under the Registrar of Companies (Forms) Rules, Legal Notice 103 of 2017), used to incorporate a company limited by shares (public or private), a company limited by guarantee, or a private unlimited company. Opens Kenya as GovSchema's 40th jurisdiction, via the Business Formation vertical (1 of 6). BRS's own current forms page (brs.go.ke/forms/) publishes CR1 as a Microsoft Word (.docx) template dated 2022-11 (upload) / 2017-11 (document content); this schema is sourced primarily from that current template rather than an older, plainer two-page PDF specimen dated 2016-02 that a Kenya Investment Authority eProcedures mirror also still hosts — see verification.notes and VERIFICATION.md for the full disclosed reasoning on why the newer, richer docx template was chosen as primary. Company registration in Kenya is now filed electronically through the BRS/eCitizen online portal; BRS's own CR1 template nonetheless remains the authoritative field-by-field specification of what a company registration requires, so this schema follows this registry's established "structural reference over a now-primarily-online process" framing (cf. pe/sunat/formulario-virtual-709-declaracion-renta, uy/dgi/inscripcion-actualizacion-empresas-formulario-0351). This v1.0.0 covers CR1's Parts I, II, III, IV and V (company details, proposed officers, statement of capital and initial shareholding, statement of guarantee, and additional PIN/NSSF/NHIF registrations); the registrar-internal "For official use only" / "Checked by" block is out of scope. Bounded repeating groups (directors/officers, share classes, initial-shareholding subscribers, guarantee members) are flattened to a disclosed cap of 2 slots each, per this registry's bounded-repeating-group convention.

Registry entry

ke/brs/cr1-application-to-register-a-company

Jurisdiction
Kenya · national
Version
1.0.0
Verification
draft
Authority
Business Registration Service

Authoritative source Form CR1, "Application to Register a Company" [section 13 of the Companies Act, 2015] — current template published on BRS's own Forms page (brs.go.ke/forms/); docx internal metadata records document authorship dated 2017-11-13, uploaded to brs.go.ke 2022-11. A plainer, earlier two-page PDF specimen of the same form ("APPLICATION TO REGISTER COMPANY LIMITED BY SHARES OR GUARANTEE OR IS UNLIMITED", dated 2016-02-02) is also still hosted at https://eprocedures.investkenya.go.ke/media/CR-1-APPLICATION-TO-REGISTER-COMPANY-LIMITED-BY-SHARES-OR-GUARANTEE-OR-IS-UNLIMITED%20(5).pdf and was fetched and cross-checked; both are disclosed in VERIFICATION.md.

Machine access

Schema document
registry/ke/brs/cr1-application-to-register-a-company/1.0.0/schema.jsonapplication/schema+json
Verification record
registry/ke/brs/cr1-application-to-register-a-company/1.0.0/VERIFICATION.mdtext/markdown
Registry catalog
registry/index.jsonone record per schema id

Field reference

89 fields, read from the published schema.json, with names, types, requiredness, and validation as the document states them. The live government form remains the authoritative source.

Fields

  • companyName string required

    The proposed name of the company being registered (as reserved), without the legal-suffix designation (e.g. "Limited").

  • companyType enum required

    The single company type being registered, resolving both the private/public and shares/guarantee/unlimited distinctions in one field. The docx presents these as four mark-one-of-four options, each with its own empty drawn selection box; the older 2016 PDF specimen only prints the first alternative of each pairing with no visible second option, which is why this schema follows the docx rather than the PDF here.

    enum: public_company_limited_by_shares | private_company_limited_by_shares | company_limited_by_guarantee | private_unlimited_company
  • articlesOfAssociationOption enum required

    Whether the company adopts wholly bespoke articles, the model articles appropriate to the selected company type, or a combination of both.

    enum: own_articles | model_articles | model_articles_with_own_supplement
  • registeredOfficeBuildingOrPlotNo string required

    Registered office: name of the building/plot No.

    classification: pii
  • registeredOfficeStreetOrRoad string required

    Registered office: street/road

    classification: pii
  • registeredOfficeDistrict string

    Not marked as obligatory by the source; some registered-office addresses (e.g. central Nairobi) have no meaningful district distinct from the town/county.

    classification: pii
  • registeredOfficeFloorOrRoomNo string

    Not marked as obligatory by the source; not every building has a distinct floor/room number.

    classification: pii
  • registeredOfficeTown string required

    Registered office: town

    classification: pii
  • registeredOfficeCounty enum required

    One of Kenya's 47 counties (Constitution of Kenya, 2010, First Schedule) — an enumerated closed list added by this schema for validation value; the source form itself leaves a plain blank rather than printing the county list.

    enum: 47 valuesclassification: pii
  • contactPoBox string required

    Contact address: P.O. Box

    classification: pii
  • contactPostalCode string required

    Contact address: postal code

    classification: pii
  • contactOfficeNo string

    Not marked as obligatory by the source.

    classification: pii
  • contactMobileNo string required

    Contact address: mobile No.

    classification: pii
  • contactEmailAddress string required

    Per the source's own footnote, this should be an email address that has never previously been used on iTax (the Kenya Revenue Authority's tax portal).

    patternclassification: pii
  • primaryBusinessActivity string required

    Primary business activity

  • secondaryBusinessActivity string

    Not marked as obligatory by the source.

  • officer1Name string required

    The source's own printed officer table has exactly one row on the base form itself (also true of the older PDF specimen's single numbered "1" row), with an instruction to "compete [sic] a separate sheet for each director, secretary (if applicable) or authorised signatory" beyond that. This schema models a disclosed bounded cap of 2 officer slots as a schema-authoring convenience (per this registry's bounded-repeating-group convention), not because the source form itself prints a second row.

    classification: pii
  • officer1Role enum required

    Whether this person is a director, secretary, and/or authorised signatory. A best-effort enum collapsing the source's own multi-role footnote ("Please state whether the person is a director, secretary and/or authorised signatory") into named single- and combined-role values, since GovSchema v0.3 fields are flat/scalar with no multi-select primitive. Per the source's footnote 3, a private company only needs a secretary if its paid-up capital is KES 5,000,000 or more; this schema does not gate officer2's secretary-related values on paid-up capital (a disclosed simplification — see VERIFICATION.md).

    enum: director | secretary | authorised_signatory | director_and_secretary | director_secretary_and_authorised_signatory
  • officer1PostalAddress string required

    Officer 1: postal address

    classification: pii
  • officer1IdentityDocumentType enum required

    The source form itself has a single blank labelled "Identity cord [sic] or passport number" with no separate document-type selector; this schema adds this discriminator field (a disclosed judgment call) so the passport-only sub-fields below can be cleanly gated with requiredWhen rather than guessed from the number's format.

    enum: national_id | passportclassification: pii
  • officer1IdOrPassportNumber string required

    Officer 1: identity-card or passport number

    classification: sensitive-pii
  • officer1PassportIssuingCountry string

    Per the source's own footnote, only completed if a passport number (rather than a national ID number) is given above.

    classification: pii
  • officer1PassportIssuingPlace string

    Officer 1: passport place of issue

    classification: pii
  • officer1PassportIssueDate date

    Officer 1: passport date of issue

    classification: pii
  • officer1Nationality string required

    Officer 1: nationality

    classification: pii
  • officer1TelephoneNo string required

    Officer 1: telephone No.

    classification: pii
  • officer1EmailAddress string required

    Officer 1: email address

    patternclassification: pii
  • officer2Name string

    Second officer slot, per this schema's disclosed bounded cap of 2 (see officer1Name's description). All of officer 2's fields are optional, since the source form's base printed table has only one row.

    classification: pii
  • officer2Role enum

    Officer 2: designation

    enum: director | secretary | authorised_signatory | director_and_secretary | director_secretary_and_authorised_signatoryclassification: pii
  • officer2PostalAddress string

    Officer 2: postal address

    classification: pii
  • officer2IdentityDocumentType enum

    Officer 2: identity-document type

    enum: national_id | passportclassification: pii
  • officer2IdOrPassportNumber string

    Officer 2: identity-card or passport number

    classification: sensitive-pii
  • officer2PassportIssuingCountry string

    Officer 2: passport issuing country

    classification: pii
  • officer2PassportIssuingPlace string

    Officer 2: passport place of issue

    classification: pii
  • officer2PassportIssueDate date

    Officer 2: passport date of issue

    classification: pii
  • officer2Nationality string

    Officer 2: nationality

    classification: pii
  • officer2TelephoneNo string

    Officer 2: telephone No.

    classification: pii
  • officer2EmailAddress string

    Officer 2: email address

    patternclassification: pii
  • shareCapitalAmountKes number

    Applies only when the company is limited by shares (Part III "Statement of Capital"). The source's own text: "Please complete this part if the company has a share capital. If the company does not have a share capital, please go to part IV below."

  • shareCapitalNumberOfShares integer

    Share capital: number of shares

  • shareCapitalNominalValuePerShareKes number

    Share capital: nominal value of each share (KES)

  • shareClass1Name string

    The share-class table prints 3 blank data rows plus a totals row; this schema models a disclosed bounded cap of 2 share-class slots.

  • shareClass1NominalValueKes number

    Share class 1: nominal value of shares (KES)

  • shareClass1AmountPaidUpKes number

    Not marked as unconditionally obligatory beyond the shares-vs-guarantee gate — "if any" per the source.

  • shareClass1AmountUnpaidKes number

    Not marked as unconditionally obligatory — "if any" per the source.

  • shareClass1TotalNumberOfShares integer

    Share class 1: total number of shares

  • shareClass1AggregateNominalValueKes number

    Share class 1: aggregate nominal value (KES)

  • shareClass2Name string

    Second share-class slot, per this schema's disclosed bounded cap of 2 (see shareClass1Name's description). Optional — most companies registering have only one class of shares.

  • shareClass2NominalValueKes number

    Share class 2: nominal value of shares (KES)

  • shareClass2AmountPaidUpKes number

    Share class 2: amount paid up on each share (KES)

  • shareClass2AmountUnpaidKes number

    Share class 2: amount unpaid on each share (KES)

  • shareClass2TotalNumberOfShares integer

    Share class 2: total number of shares

  • shareClass2AggregateNominalValueKes number

    Share class 2: aggregate nominal value (KES)

  • totalNumberOfSharesAllClasses integer

    TOTALS: total number of shares (all classes)

  • totalAggregateNominalValueAllClassesKes number

    TOTALS: aggregate nominal value (all classes, KES)

  • votingRightsDescription string

    Not marked as unconditionally obligatory by the source beyond the general instruction to "set out below particulars of each of the following class of shares specified above."

  • dividendRightsDescription string

    Rights attached to shares: dividend/distribution rights

  • capitalReturnRightsDescription string

    Rights attached to shares: right to participate in a return of capital

  • redemptionTermsDescription string

    Rights attached to shares: redemption terms

  • subscriber1NameAndAddress string

    Statement of initial shareholding. The source prints 10 numbered subscriber rows; this schema models a disclosed bounded cap of 2 subscriber slots (see officer1Name's description for the same convention).

    classification: pii
  • subscriber1ClassOfShares string

    Subscriber 1: class of shares

  • subscriber1NumberOfSharesHeld integer

    Subscriber 1: number of shares held

  • subscriber1NominalValuePerShareKes number

    Subscriber 1: nominal value of each share (KES)

  • subscriber1AmountPaidUpPerShareKes number

    "If any" per the source.

  • subscriber1AmountUnpaidPerShareKes number

    "If any" per the source.

  • subscriber2NameAndAddress string

    Second subscriber slot, per this schema's disclosed bounded cap of 2 (see subscriber1NameAndAddress's description). Optional — a single-shareholder company only needs subscriber 1.

    classification: pii
  • subscriber2ClassOfShares string

    Subscriber 2: class of shares

  • subscriber2NumberOfSharesHeld integer

    Subscriber 2: number of shares held

  • subscriber2NominalValuePerShareKes number

    Subscriber 2: nominal value of each share (KES)

  • subscriber2AmountPaidUpPerShareKes number

    Subscriber 2: amount paid up on each share (KES)

  • subscriber2AmountUnpaidPerShareKes number

    Subscriber 2: amount unpaid on each share (KES)

  • guarantor1NameAndAddress string

    Statement of Guarantee (Part IV), completed only if the company is limited by guarantee. The source prints 4 numbered member rows; this schema models a disclosed bounded cap of 2 slots.

    classification: pii
  • guarantor1Address string

    Guarantee member 1: address

    classification: pii
  • guarantor2NameAndAddress string

    Second guarantee-member slot, per this schema's disclosed bounded cap of 2 (see guarantor1NameAndAddress's description).

    classification: pii
  • guarantor2Address string

    Guarantee member 2: address

    classification: pii
  • targetBusinessStartDate date

    Target business start date

  • numberOfEmployeesAtStartDate integer

    Number of employees at target business start date

  • isSubsidiaryCompany boolean

    Is the company you are registering a subsidiary company?

  • holdingCompanyResidentInKenya boolean

    Is the Principal Holding company resident in Kenya?

  • holdingCompanyPin string

    Kenya Revenue Authority Personal Identification Number format (one letter, nine digits, one letter).

    pattern
  • holdingCompanyName string

    Name of Holding Company

  • holdingCompanyCountry string

    Country in which holding company is located

  • wasFormedByAcquisitionOrAmalgamation boolean

    Was your business formed as a result of acquisition or amalgamation?

  • acquisitionAmalgamationType enum

    Type of bond (acquisition or amalgamation)

    enum: acquisition | amalgamation
  • acquisitionAmalgamationCompanyPin string

    Per the source's own footnote: "Provide the PIN of the company which will cease to exist, that is the one which was acquired or both the companies which are amalgamating."

    pattern
  • acquisitionAmalgamationDate date

    Date of acquisition or amalgamation

  • lodgedByName string required

    Lodged on behalf of the company by

    classification: pii
  • lodgedByAddress string

    Synthesized from the older 2016 PDF specimen's more detailed closing section ("Address of the person lodging this application"), which the current BRS docx compresses to a single "Lodged on behalf of the company by:" line with no separate address blank — a disclosed cross-source addition rather than a field literally printed on the chosen primary (docx) source. See VERIFICATION.md.

    classification: pii
  • lodgedByCapacity enum

    Synthesized from the older 2016 PDF specimen's closing section ("(Subscriber/Agent) (Strike out whichever does not apply)"), which the current BRS docx does not separately capture. See lodgedByAddress's description and VERIFICATION.md.

    enum: subscriber | agent

Verification record

This file is the source-review record for this document version. It documents the provenance of the published fields/documents and states the current verification claim honestly.

Current claim

  • status: draft
  • verification.method: manual-source-review-v1
  • verification.lastVerifiedAt: 2026-07-12

This is GovSchema Standard Research cycle GOV-2493. It opens Kenya as GovSchema's 40th jurisdiction (confirmed by counting ls registry/ before and after — 39 directories before this schema, 40 after), via the Business Formation vertical (1 of 6). A prior session had scouted Kenya's Business Registration Service (BRS) Form CR1 as reachable; nothing from that prior report was trusted without an independent re-fetch/re-derivation, and doing so surfaced a material discrepancy the prior pass missed — see "The docx-vs-PDF discovery" below.

Sources examined

Source 1 — BRS's own current Forms page and its CR1 download (chosen as source.url)
  • URL (forms index page): https://brs.go.ke/forms/ — fetched directly via curl, HTTP 200. This is BRS's own, currently-live forms listing; its table row for CR1 reads: "CR1 | Application to register a company - [section 13 of the companies Act, 2015]", linking to the docx below.
  • URL (CR1 docx download): https://brs.go.ke/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/CR1.docx
  • Fetched directly via curl -L: HTTP 200, Content-Type: application/vnd.openxmlformats-officedocument.wordprocessingml.document, 37,952 bytes, Last-Modified: Wed, 21 Dec 2022 09:53:57 GMT, sha256:45e367a6eb47c49fef17bc32cec18bd99d281f7ee61715b3eb19ba2968174a8d.
  • The docx's own internal OOXML metadata (docProps/core.xml) records dcterms:created/dcterms:modified = 2017-11-13, authored by "Margaret Wangu" — i.e. the document content dates to shortly after the Companies Act, 2015 and the Registrar of Companies (Forms) Rules, Legal Notice 103 of 2017 took effect, even though the file was last uploaded to brs.go.ke in 2022-11.
  • Extracted with a custom Python script (no pip/pandoc in this sandbox) that unzips the .docx (it's a zip of XML parts), reads word/document.xml, and reconstructs paragraph/table-row/table-cell boundaries from the raw <w:p>/<w:tr>/<w:tc> markup before stripping tags — necessary because a naive <w:t>-only text join collapses table structure and loses which label goes with which blank.
Source 2 — the older PDF specimen (cross-checked, NOT chosen as primary; both disclosed)
  • URL: https://eprocedures.investkenya.go.ke/media/CR-1-APPLICATION-TO-REGISTER-COMPANY-LIMITED-BY-SHARES-OR-GUARANTEE-OR-IS-UNLIMITED%20(5).pdf (Kenya Investment Authority's eProcedures/eRegulations portal, also a .go.ke government domain).
  • Fetched directly via curl: HTTP 200, Content-Type: application/pdf, 192,752 bytes, Last-Modified: Tue, 02 Feb 2016 13:30:42 GMT, sha256:0772ddb41d4511159fab22ba1fc11194bb0957a06d3388a0270833773e997100.
  • pdfjs-dist's (legacy/build/pdf.mjs) getDocument().promise metadata reports PDFFormatVersion: "1.5", IsAcroFormPresent: false, IsXFAPresent: false, Producer: "Microsoft® Word 2010", CreationDate/ModDate: D:20160202163027+03'00'.
  • AcroForm widget count, re-confirmed independently (not trusted from the prior report): page.getAnnotations() on both of the PDF's 2 pages returns 0 annotations, 0 widgets on each page — 0 widgets total, matching IsAcroFormPresent: false. This is a genuine printed, blank-line fill-in-the-blank text specimen, not an interactive PDF form — confirmed, not assumed.
  • Full text extracted with getTextContent(), item-by-item, keeping each glyph run's transform matrix (x,y) so the printed layout/line-spacing could be inspected directly (see "The docx-vs-PDF discovery" below).
The docx-vs-PDF discovery

The task brief's prior-session framing was that the PDF and docx were the same form in two formats, differing only in upload date (2016 vs 2022), and that this registry's usual "prefer the static PDF" convention should apply with both disclosed. That framing turned out to be wrong on inspection — the two documents have materially different content, not just format.

The 2016 PDF specimen's item 2 prints only one branch of the private/public choice: "The company is a private company; or" — with no second line, no checkbox glyph, and no visible "public company" alternative anywhere in the coordinate-ordered text dump (confirmed by dumping every text item's y/x position; the gap after item 2 before item 3 is consistent with ordinary paragraph spacing, not a missing/invisible second line of content). Item 7 similarly prints only "The liability of the members is limited by shares" with no guarantee/unlimited alternative visible. Raw zlib-decompressed content-stream inspection (the stream...endstream bytes, decompressed and grepped for Tj/TJ text-show operators) confirms this is not a font-substitution or extraction artifact — the operators for those two items literally contain no more text than what getTextContent() reported. This specimen appears to be an early, apparently-truncated draft — dated 2016-02, before Legal Notice 103 of 2017 (the Forms Rules that formally prescribe CR1) was even gazetted.

The BRS docx, by contrast, has an explicit, fully-resolved mechanism for both distinctions:

  • Item 2, "Type of company: (select the type of company that applies)", lists all four options as its own paragraphs: "Public company limited by shares", "Private company limited by shares", "Company limited by guarantee", "Private unlimited company". Inspecting the raw word/document.xml around this item shows each option is paired with its own floating <w:drawing> anchor — a small (~0.3in × 0.26in) empty rectangle shape (<a:prstGeom prst="rect">) positioned immediately to its left. This is a genuine mark-one-of-four selection mechanism (an empty box to hand-tick), not an AcroForm field and not a rendering artifact — the docx has 0 w:checkBox/w:sdt content controls (checked via regex count), confirming these are drawn boxes, not interactive form fields either.
  • Item 3, "Articles of association ... (select the option that applies)", resolves the second ambiguity the same way, with three options: "has prepared its own articles of association", "will adopt the model articles of association applicable to the type of company selected above", "will adopt some of those model articles and has prepared its own articles of association to supplement or modify those model articles".

Decision: this schema's primary source is the BRS docx, not the PDF, despite this registry's general preference for a static PDF over a docx when the two are parallel copies of the same content. That general preference does not cleanly apply here because the discrepancy is about scope and currency of content, not format: the docx is (a) hosted as BRS's own currently-linked download on its own live Forms page today, (b) internally dated to shortly after the 2015 Act/2017 Forms Rules took effect (versus the PDF's 2016-02 date, which precedes the 2017 Forms Rules), and (c) the only one of the two that actually resolves the private/public and shares/guarantee/unlimited selection cleanly, rather than leaving one ambiguous. The PDF is still fetched, hashed, and disclosed in schema.json's description/source.documentRef and here, and several of its own sections (see "Cross-source synthesis" below) are used where the docx compresses detail the PDF states more fully.

Given the docx cleanly resolves both original ambiguities via one companyType enum, this schema does not need to scope down to a "private company limited by shares only" path — all four company types are modelled, with Part III (share capital) and Part IV (guarantee) gated by companyType via requiredWhen.

Source 3 — legal-currency check (Companies Act 2015 / Legal Notice 103 of 2017)
  • Web search confirmed the Companies Act, 2015 remains in force (Kenya Law's consolidated edition current to 2024-12-27) and the Registrar of Companies (Forms) Rules, Legal Notice 103 of 2017 remains in force, amended but not repealed (Kenya Law's consolidated edition current to 2022-12-31; it itself revoked the prior 2015 forms rules, L.N. 254/2015).
  • Attempting to fetch Kenya Law's own gazette PDF of L.N. 103/2017 directly (new.kenyalaw.org/akn/ke/act/ln/2017/103/eng@2022-12-31/source.pdf) was blocked by a WAF (HTTP 403 on both curl and WebFetch) — disclosed here as a limitation rather than silently worked around; the in-force determination above rests on Kenya Law's own search-indexed page metadata and independent secondary confirmation (see next bullet), not a direct read of the gazette text.
  • Multiple current (2025/2026-dated) Kenyan legal-practice guides (e.g. wka.co.ke, muteamuthuriadvocates.com) independently list CR1 among the standard company-incorporation forms still in use (alongside CR2, CR8, and the Statement of Nominal Capital), confirming CR1 has not been withdrawn or replaced as of 2026.
  • These same sources confirm that registration is now filed electronically through BRS on the eCitizen platform — company incorporation in Kenya is effectively a digital-first process today. Per this registry's established "structural reference over a now-primarily-online process" framing (see pe/sunat/formulario-virtual-709-declaracion-renta, uy/dgi/inscripcion-actualizacion-empresas-formulario-0351), BRS's own CR1 template remains the authoritative field-by-field specification of what a company registration requires, even though applicants rarely fill in this literal document by hand any more. This is disclosed, not treated as disqualifying.
Source 4 — the Business Registration Service itself
  • Web search confirms BRS is a State Corporation established under the Business Registration Service Act, 2015 (Cap 499B), operating under the Office of the Attorney-General and Department of Justice, consolidating functions previously fragmented across the old Companies Registry, Registrar of Business Names, etc. authority.name is set to "Business Registration Service" (abbreviation "BRS"), matching brs.go.ke's own self-description; the Attorney-General/DOJ affiliation is noted in this file rather than in authority itself, since BRS (not the AG's office) is the form-publishing body.

Field inventory and scoping/disclosure decisions

CR1 (docx) has five parts. This v1.0.0 models all five (Parts I–V); the "For official use only" / "Companies registry — Checked by" block at the end is registrar-internal and explicitly out of scope, per the task brief.

  1. companyType (Part I, item 2) is the single field resolving both the private/public and shares/guarantee/unlimited distinctions, per the docx's four mark-one-of-four options described above: public_company_limited_by_shares, private_company_limited_by_shares, company_limited_by_guarantee, private_unlimited_company. Part III (Statement of Capital/initial shareholding) is gated requiredWhen companyType in [public_company_limited_by_shares, private_company_limited_by_shares], matching the source's own instruction ("Please complete this part if the company has a share capital. If the company does not have a share capital, please go to part IV below."); Part IV (Statement of Guarantee) is gated requiredWhen companyType equals company_limited_by_guarantee, matching its own instruction ("Please complete this part if the company is limited by guarantee"). A private_unlimited_company is left ungated by either Part III or Part IV — Kenyan private unlimited companies can be registered with or without share capital and the source form does not spell out which of Parts III/IV such a company completes, so this schema does not force either — a disclosed edge-case looseness rather than a guess.
  2. registeredOfficeCounty's enum is Kenya's 47 counties (Constitution of Kenya, 2010, First Schedule) — a well-known, independently-verifiable closed list added by this schema for validation value, since the source form itself leaves a plain blank rather than printing the county list (the same convention uy/dgi's domicilioFiscalDepartamento used for Uruguay's 19 departments).
  3. **Officer/director table bounded to a cap of 2 slots (officer1*/officer2*).** Both source editions agree the printed base form itself has exactly one row/slot: the docx's own instruction reads "Compete [sic] a separate sheet for each director, secretary (if applicable) or authorised signatory," and the 2016 PDF specimen's officer table likewise shows only a single numbered "1" row with a footnote to add further rows by continuation sheet. This schema's second slot (officer2*) is a disclosed schema-authoring convenience — following this registry's established bounded-repeating-group convention (e.g. no/brreg's 2–3-row board tables, uy/dgi's owner-plus-second-person pair) — not a second row actually printed on the base form. All of officer2*'s fields are optional; only officer1* carries required: true (or requiredWhen, for the passport sub-fields).
  4. officer1Role/officer2Role collapse the source's own multi-role footnote ("state whether the person is a director, secretary and/or authorised signatory") into a 5-value best-effort enum — GovSchema v0.3 fields are flat/scalar with no multi-select primitive, so director/secretary/authorised_signatory/director_and_secretary/ director_secretary_and_authorised_signatory covers the realistic combinations without a full role-flags cross-product. Per the docx's own footnote 3, a private company only needs a secretary once its paid-up capital reaches KES 5,000,000; this schema does not gate the secretary-related enum values on paid-up capital — disclosed rather than modelled with a fabricated requiredWhen.
  5. officer1IdentityDocumentType/officer2IdentityDocumentType are fields this schema adds, not fields literally printed on the source. The source has one blank labelled "Identity cord [sic] or passport number" with a footnote ("If a passport number is provided, please also indicate the issuing country and place and date of issue of the passport") but no separate document-type selector. This schema adds the discriminator so officer{N}PassportIssuingCountry/...Place/...Date can be cleanly gated with requiredWhen … equals "passport" rather than inferring document type from the number's format (which would be guesswork) or fabricating a requiredWhen: notEquals "" against an optional field (the known-buggy pattern this registry has already documented and this cycle deliberately avoids).
  6. **Share-class table (Part III, item 8) bounded to a cap of 2 slots (shareClass1*/shareClass2*), plus one totalNumberOfSharesAllClasses/ totalAggregateNominalValueAllClassesKes pair for the table's own "TOTALS" row. The docx's table prints 3** blank data rows before the TOTALS row; this schema caps at 2, disclosed, since most companies registering at incorporation have only one class of shares ("ordinary"), occasionally two.
  7. **Statement of initial shareholding (Part III, item 9) bounded to a cap of 2 subscriber slots (subscriber1*/subscriber2*). The docx prints a genuinely numbered 10-row** table (rows literally labelled "1." through "10."); this schema caps at 2 for conciseness, disclosed, following the same bounded-repeating-group convention as the officer table above. A company with more than 2 initial subscribers is not fully representable by this v1.0.0 — a real limitation, not silently glossed over.
  8. **Statement of Guarantee (Part IV) bounded to a cap of 2 slots (guarantor1*/guarantor2*). The docx prints a numbered 4-row** table; this schema caps at 2, disclosed, for the same reason as above.
  9. "Rights attached to each class of shares" (Part III, item 9 in the docx's own numbering — confusingly the same numeral used twice, once for the shareholding statement and once here; this schema's field names disambiguate by content) is modelled as four free-text description fields (votingRightsDescription, dividendRightsDescription, capitalReturnRightsDescription, redemptionTermsDescription) mirroring the source's own four row labels (voting rights / dividend or distribution rights / right to participate in a return of capital / redemption terms), none marked obligatory by the source beyond the general "set out below particulars" instruction.
  10. lodgedByAddress and lodgedByCapacity are synthesized from the older 2016 PDF specimen, not the chosen-primary docx. The docx's closing section reads only "Lodged on behalf of the company by:" followed by a single blank, immediately preceding the registrar-internal "OFFICIAL USE / Companies registry / Checked by: Name/Address/Signature/Capacity/ Date" block (confirmed by inspecting the raw word/document.xml — these Name:/Address:/Signature:/Capacity:/Date: blanks belong to the "Checked by:" registrar block, not to the applicant's lodging statement, and are out of scope per the task brief's registrar-internal exclusion). The 2016 PDF specimen has a fuller applicant-side closing section — "This application is lodged by: ______", "Address of the person lodging this application: ______", "(Subscriber/Agent) (Strike out whichever does not apply)" — which this schema draws on for lodgedByAddress/ lodgedByCapacity specifically, a disclosed cross-source addition rather than a field literally printed on the docx. lodgedByName itself is sourced from the docx (required); the other two are optional.
  11. holdingCompanyPin/acquisitionAmalgamationCompanyPin use a KRA PIN format pattern (^[A-Z][0-9]{9}[A-Z]$ — one letter, nine digits, one letter), the standard Kenya Revenue Authority Personal Identification Number shape, independently well-known rather than itself printed on CR1.
  12. documents[] — the docx's own Part II instruction: "attach the following documents for each [director/secretary/authorised signatory]: Copy of Kenyan national identification card or passport; Copy of PIN certificate issued by Kenya Revenue Authority (not applicable to persons who are not Kenyan residents); and Coloured passport-sized photograph." The 2016 PDF specimen's page-2 header independently corroborates the same three-document list ("Attach copies of national I.D, KRA-PIN and passport photograph"). All three are modelled as required: true top-level documents (this schema's flattened officer1/officer2 model has no clean single boolean to gate a per-person nationality carve-out on); the KRA-PIN-certificate document's handling field discloses the "not applicable to non-Kenyan-resident persons" carve-out in prose rather than fabricating a requiredWhen, following this registry's established convention for a condition too narrow for this schema's flattened repeating-group model to gate cleanly (precedent: vn/bca/to-khai-dang-ky-xe's ownershipTransferChainDocuments). The officers' consent statement ("I/We hereby consent to act as director/ secretary of the company") is modelled as an attestation-category document, not a boolean field, per this registry's convention for verbatim consent statements.

Test run (Phase 4)

No live submission was attempted — CR1 is filed as part of an eCitizen/BRS online incorporation dossier, not a self-service API GovSchema can exercise. Verification here is against the schema's own structural rules (tools/validate.mjs, tools/validate-ajv.mjs) plus a hand-rolled, from-scratch conformance-fixture check (not reused from any other schema's checker) that explicitly exercises both fields[] and documents[] requiredness — the latter is a known blind spot past conformance passes in this registry have skipped.

Fixtures under conformance/ke/brs/cr1-application-to-register-a-company/1.0.0/:

| Fixture | Scenario | Expected | Actual | |---|---|---|---| | private-company-limited-by-shares-single-director.json | Valid: private company limited by shares, one officer (director+secretary), one share class, one subscriber, national-ID officer | 0 errors | 0 errors | | company-limited-by-guarantee-two-officers-passport-holder.json | Valid: company limited by guarantee, two officers (one passport holder with issuing country/place/date filled), two guarantee members | 0 errors | 0 errors | | mutation-control-missing-required-field.json | Drops companyName from the first valid fixture | 1 error (MISSING_REQUIRED: companyName) | 1 error | | mutation-control-email-pattern-violation.json | Sets contactEmailAddress to "not-an-email-address" | 1 error (PATTERN_VIOLATION) | 1 error | | mutation-control-missing-conditional-passport-field.json | Drops officer1PassportIssuingCountry while officer1IdentityDocumentType is "passport" | 1 error (MISSING_REQUIRED, conditional) | 1 error | | mutation-control-missing-required-document.json | Removes the officerPassportPhoto entry from documents[] | 1 error (MISSING_REQUIRED_DOCUMENT) | 1 error |

All 6 fixtures matched their expectation exactly. Both registry validators pass with 0 errors:

``` $ node tools/validate.mjs 377/377 document(s) passed. 3/3 mapping.json companion(s) passed.

$ node tools/validate-ajv.mjs 377/377 document(s) validated against the meta-schema (ajv 2020-12). 3/3 mapping.json companion(s) validated. ```

tools/govschema-client's registry-index.json was regenerated (npm run build-index) and now includes this document.

What was NOT fully resolved (disclosed, not silently guessed)

  • Kenya Law's own gazette PDF of Legal Notice 103 of 2017 could not be directly fetched (WAF 403 on both curl and WebFetch); the in-force determination rests on Kenya Law's indexed metadata plus independent secondary legal-practice sources, not a direct read of the gazette text itself.
  • The private-unlimited-company path's interaction with Parts III/IV is not fully specified by the source form itself and is left ungated in this schema (see judgment call 1).
  • Bounded-repeating-group caps (2 officers, 2 share classes, 2 subscribers, 2 guarantee members) mean a company with more directors/subscribers/ guarantee members than these caps cannot be fully represented by this v1.0.0 — a real, disclosed scope limit, not a defect.

View the raw record (VERIFICATION.md)

Version history

  • 1.0.0 draft latest this page has verification record schema.json

Independent and non-affiliated

GovSchema is an independent, open-source project. This reference is not produced, reviewed, or endorsed by Business Registration Service or any government. The authoritative source is always the live government form and its official instructions.