Kiambu County has borrowed a leaf from the national government’s digital transformation drive by recently launching a new digital platform. Key features of the Kiambu Digital Platform include the enablement of cashless payments, an online citizen services portal, and a robust back-end management system to support it.
In 2013, Kiambu County Government identified that it needed to embrace technology in order address five key challenges, namely: better collection of revenue to bridge the revenue collection gap; improved service delivery to the citizens of Kiambu; higher fiscal accountability for the people of Kiambu; better control over expenses, sealing ‘leaks’ reducing waste, and; realizing its vision of making Kiambu the best county to grow, live and work.
According to Governor William Kabogo, the first step of meeting these challenges was to implement a new system that would allow for better revenue collection hence the creation of the digital platform. He further states that since implementing the new revenue collection solution, Kiambu has freed up budget and resources that were tied to internal operations, leading to the county recording a 90% growth in revenue collection for the financial year 2014-2015.
Kiambu County Government’s ICT Roadmap incorporates two phases, the first of which involved revenue automation and business intelligence. Phase 2 of the project is underway and involves the complete automation of devolved County functions with the stated objective of 600% growth in revenue collection within five years.