The government has expressed concern over the number of uncollected national ID cards and is now urging Kenyans to collect their IDs.
In his speech on Thursday, Immigration Principal Secretary Belio Kipsang stated that there are currently 460,000 ID cards lying idle in the country.
“The number of uncollected Identification Cards has reached 460,000. Citizenship documents are very important documents,” he said.
The government has in the past few years been improving the process of acquiring national IDs. This has seen the government upgrade the process to include the use of biometric technology.
So far, the government has managed to issue close to 34.9 million national IDs. In the last two and a half years, the government has issued 4.1 million IDs to new applicants. In the last six months, the government has managed to process nearly 1.6 million national IDs.
However, according to PS, the increase is a clear indication that people are now realizing the reasons why one needs to have an ID.
He further stated that there has been an effort to bring registration closer to people, especially in areas that have been left out in previous years
“Much more important is the urge to reach counties, the underserved counties. We developed new guidelines for registration of IDs, we brought in govt officers to confirm who gets an ID,” he said.
The urge to pick up IDs comes at a time when Huduma Kenya announced that it has identified centres across the country where Kenyans can apply for and pick up their IDs.
These centres are located in different counties including Kisumu, Mombasa, Nakuru, Nyeri, and many others.
The government is now asking people who applied for IDs to pick them up from the nearest ID collection centres and is saying that IDs are important for identification and service provision.
