During the staging of Connected Kenya 2018 at the Bomas of Kenya, the Cabinet Secretary for ICT Joe Mucheru revealed that the government was planning to issue unique numbers for all Kenyan citizens at Huduma Centres. Dubbed Huduma Number, the unique identifiers are meant to hasten delivery of services as the state continues to synchronize citizens’ data with other government services.
It appears that the exercise is set to start as President Uhuru Kenyatta has tasked relevant authorities to launch the digital registration process. The unique numbers will be generated by the National Integrated Management System (NIMS) to supplement existing personal identities for people.
The database will augment the features and offerings of the Integrated Population Registration System that maintains a national population register for social and economic development as the government continues to develop a central master population database.
These activities go in line with e-government functions, where accountability of actions or records is one of the key requirements. While the details of the process are yet to be revealed, the government would like to know which Kenyan has taken a specific action, or which citizen is the owner of a certain record. On the other hand, we can only speculate that the government is trying to streamline these records for accountability, which may strongly rely on Huduma Numbers.
We hope Huduma Numbers will give Kenyans additional advantages of not submitting multiple documents to avail services as we have seen with e-citizen where Kenyans no longer need to go various government departments to prove their identities each time.
