Over 1,000 services offered by public universities will be available soon on the eCitizen portal as part of President William Ruto's directive authorising all government entities to embrace digitization.
On June 30, President Ruto gave all public institutions, including universities, an end-of-year deadline to digitise their services. Besides cutting the cost of time and money for clients seeking government services, the campaign is also expected to minimise corruption and pilferage believed to cost the government millions of shillings in revenue.
In line with this directive, Vice Chancellors and other senior administrators from 47 public universities met in Athi River on Thursday, August 10, to finalise onboarding admission procedures and other essential services.
Immigration Principal Secretary Julius Bitok, who chaired the retreat, listed the benefits of digital migration, adding that universities could now track online and real-time revenue collection from the students' payments and other services offered by the institutions.
He added that the digital migration move would be linked to the launch of the digital and Unique Personal Identifier number set to be launched before the year ends.
According to the PS, digitisation would further enhance transparency and accountability in all institutions. All students will thus access all university services through the government's eCitizen mobile application, known as Gava Mkononi.
"We believe that when all the services are on the platform, a student wants to pay for a meal or a book can pay through the phone and the university can get the funds real-time," he stated.
Universities joining the Citizen platform will thus aid the Kenya Kwanza administration in hitting its revenue target of Ksh4 trillion by June 2027.
During the 2022/23 financial year, Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA) recorded a revenue collection of Ksh2.166 trillion compared to Ksh2.031 trillion in the last financial year.
"Right now, we're collecting Ksh2.1 trillion, but we're projecting to collect Ksh4.5 trillion when we use technology to collect more taxes. We also want to eliminate corruption as we realised there were so many leakages," Bitok stated at the retreat.
"We will also create job opportunities because the Gava Mkononi app will be rolled out in every village and will be using a mobile money model," he added.
Bitok reiterated President Ruto's directive to use a uniform pay bill by the end of August 2023. On June 30, 2023, the head of state ordered all Ministries, Departments and Agencies to use only one pay bill number to collect revenue for government services. This resulted in the closure of over 1,448 pay bill numbers shut down.
Over 5,127 government services are currently available on Citizen, and an almost similar number is targeted for online end-to-end availability by December 2023.
