The Directorate of e-Government in the Presidency and Cabinet Affairs Office is charged with providing services to the Citizens through the use of Information Technologies. The principal concern of developing this system was based on the need for providing services to the citizens. According to the development blue print, Kenya vision 2030, ICT has been identified as necessary in raising productivity and efficiency levels and also critical for accelerating economic development.
Most government information is treated as confidential, not freely acquired, is inaccessible and remains untraceable. At the moment there are challenges of finding where information about a particular service is and in what form. In some cases, little useful information is available to the citizens which are sometimes out of date. Government services which involve contacts with several departments or agencies are disjointed and the citizens often feel shunted around. There is no interfaces between the services which are normally related and the citizens have to incur huge costs to get the services that could ordinarily be got from a one single shop. Delays associated with the big queues only to gather information on a particular service are a common occurrence therefore undermining the economic productivity of the citizens. It should be borne in mind that this is sometimes information from interrelated departments which normally provide information in silos thereby making citizens undergo unnecessary processes compounded by bureaucracy.
In the cases where there are customer care desks there are unsatisfactory and do not have full accurate information as there are not integrated within the various department/Ministries thereby compounding the problems. At the same time there is a natural human tendency of not gathering information for fear of humiliations especially in during human interaction in a public place.
In order to access these services the citizens are forced to travel long distances which sometimes are unnecessary. The journey is also prohibitive for the people in the low cadre of the society since it requires travelling for a long journey at huge costs just in the name of seeking for information. For those with limited finances and literacy levels, access to Internet remains a problem and the increasing use of such technology may discriminate against such groups. The system has also embraced the language barriers of the citizens and is bilingual utilizing the two national languages in Kenya therefore ensuring that everybody is able to access the information.
Based on these scenarios, the Government needs to be more proactive in providing better approaches of providing information to citizens given the current information delivery mechanism. In this context information ought to be presented in a more presentable cost effective manner given the increased use of IT as an access channel of offering Government services.
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