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Uncollected ID cards at a government office. One of the areas that need urgent automation is identification. PHOTO | FILE
By Mbugua Njihia
The government is recruiting volunteers aged between
22 and 30 years for a one-year internship programme. The individuals
should be recent university graduates, according to adverts.
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What they will do has not been spelled out. This gap has created room for discussion on what is possible, can work and may not.
In such a discussion with some industry peers
recently, I told them the direction taken may not be the best and
offered what may work.
Let me share what I think will have impact.
In the past, I have said that the government is
well placed to drive up the uptake of technology by delivering services
to citizens and meet other objectives such as job creation.
We have many youth who are not gainfully employed; a
good number have basic education – reading, writing and arithmetic. In
government, we have many tasks that need to be done to get us to fully
take advantage of a digital economy.
Case in point: lost identity cards. A citizen
without an identity card is disabled in many ways, unable to access
government and other services and, by extension, unable to work.
Technology allows for broadest possible reach with lowest possible overheads by meeting of key performance indicators.
The concept of micro-work is not new and can be
easily mapped to the government’s drive to create opportunities for the
youth and, in the same vein, meet its obligations to citizens.
The cost of producing a new identity card is much higher than ensuring the reconnection of citizens and the important document.
Bigger impact
With lost identification documents stacked high at
police stations, the information held can be digitised at scale and the
tasks assigned to hundreds of thousands of youth who then get paid —
whether via mobile money or airtime, based on output.
The created ecosystem could be applied to other opportunities as well.
There are several other factors to be considered in
this particular example, but the spirit remains there could be a
better way to achieve bigger, impact-leveraging technology.
Because it is a given that the volunteer programme will not sustainably assimilate more than 100,000 youth.
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