Corporates root for support of the Big 4 Agenda at Devolution Conference - Capital Business
Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

Government

Corporates root for support of the Big 4 Agenda at Devolution Conference

The conference brings together stakeholders from all the 47 counties across the country.

KAKAMEGA, Kenya, Apr 24 – The 5th Annual Devolution Conference currently ongoing at Kakamega High School has seen corporates pledge support for the President’s Big Four Agenda that focuses on Health, Manufacturing, Housing and Food Security.

The conference whose theme is Sustainable, productive, Effective and Efficient Governments for Results Delivery was officially opened today by H.E President Uhuru Kenyatta and brings together stakeholders from all the 47 counties across the country.

Speaking to the press at the sidelines of the conference, Joseph Ogutu, Safaricom Director of Strategy and Innovation noted that members of the private sector are ready to support government’s efforts to give priority to social protection as a way of giving a chance to Kenyans to fully exploit their potential.

“We recognize the need for the government to provide essential services to its people to spur development. As a result, Safaricom has been at the forefront in advancing this agenda by putting in place various interventions geared towards enhancing the government operations to its people,” he said.

Some of the innovations spearheaded by Safaricom include DigiFarm, a robust end to end mobile agriculture platform that enables farmer registration and profiling; providing accurate information for decision making and resource allocation.

The platform contributes towards sustainable food production by providing smallholder farmers with tailor-made knowledge and information; quality and affordable inputs; access to finance, access to insurance and access to markets.

“As a result, over 700,000 farmers across 15 counties are now registered on this platform that is also providing efficiencies to the Ministry of Agriculture through real-time and location-based payment transactions for government-subsidized inputs. We continue to recruit more farmers right across the country,” he added.

On the healthcare front, Safaricom has connected all County Level 5 hospitals to fibre, which has provided great ease of record keeping and brought telemedicine within the reach of our county healthcare personnel and the communities they serve.

“With telemedicine a specialist sitting halfway across the world can beam his knowledge to medical colleagues attending to a patient in a hospital in any part of the country. All these auger well with the universal health care ambition as it provides a simple and easy platform for patient registration, co-payments and service transparency and tracking for claims”, Joseph said.

Going forward, Safaricom seeks to enhance partnerships between various county governments to offer solutions in health agriculture and technology in an effort to build their capacity to carry out their functions seamlessly.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.
Advertisement

More on Capital Business