Wednesday, December 24, 2014 Youth join rush for State billions

 

 A young person being informed of the Youth Enterprise Development Fund in Nyeri on November 18, 2014. PHOTO | JOSEPH KANYI |  NATION MEDIA GROUP

 

By JEREMIAH KIPLANG'AT
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In Summary

• The Ministry of Devolution Wednesday announced that the new companies will be given preference by the government.
• In a statement outlining the ministry’s achievements this year, Ms Waiguru said there was rising appetite for tenders by the youths and persons with disabilities despite earlier reports of disinterest.

The battle for lucrative government tenders worth billions of shillings has intensified following registration of 6000 new companies, most of them belonging to the youth and the disabled.

The Ministry of Devolution Wednesday announced that the new companies will be given preference by the government.

Devolution Cabinet Secretary Anne Waiguru said the government was eager to ensure that the previously sidelined groups benefited from the tenders.

“As of December 2014, the Treasury has over 6,000 companies registered. We will continue to work with ministries and semi-autonomous government agencies to realise greater allocation of government tenders and contracts to these registered companies” Ms Waiguru said in a statement yesterday.

The youth groups will battle it out with established companies for the contracts that cover road construction, office supplies among other services.
The exact value of government tenders is not clear but it is estimated to run into billions of shillings every financial year.

So far, the two groups have benefited from over Sh6 billion worth of tenders since the Jubilee government took over last year.

RISING APPETITE

In a statement outlining the ministry’s achievements this year, Ms Waiguru said there was rising appetite for tenders by the youths and persons with disabilities despite earlier reports of disinterest.

“We are seeing modest success in the 30 per cent allocation of all public procurement to youth, women and persons with disabilities, with over 4,000 registered companies benefiting in the past twenty months from public procurement of over Sh6.4 billion,” she said.

President Uhuru Kenyatta has made it mandatory that 30 per cent of government tenders must be allocated to the youth and other sidelined groups.
Former President Kibaki had set the pace by setting the figure at 10 per cent.

Ms Waiguru also said that 13 Huduma Centres have been established across the country this year in a bid to decentralise service provision.

Four of the centres are in Nairobi and others in Machakos, Mombasa, Nyeri, Embu, Nakuru, Eldoret, Kakamega, Kisumu, Kisii and Kajiado counties. Each provides a range of services including processing of ID cards, birth and death certificate and driving license.

The ministry also seeks to recruit 20,000 young Kenyans to join the National Youth Service before June 2015, up from 4,000 in 2014.