The Machakos County Commissioner (CC), Esther Maina has called for total commitment from civil servants charged with the implementation of national government development projects in order to make them successful.
Speaking on Friday during the second County Development implementation Coordination Committee (CDICC) meeting held at her Boardroom, Mrs. Maina stressed the need for the officers to take their responsibility seriously noting that their decisions and actions impact on the success or failure of the projects.
The CC who chairs the meeting particularly urged the members to personally attend the meetings without failure. The meetings, she noted, provide a platform to assess the progress of individual projects as well as the challenges facing them, with a view to addressing them or recommending possible solutions.
Mrs. Maina particularly took issue with the committee members who delegate the attendance of the meetings to their juniors saying the trend should be stopped.
“These are very serious meetings where we interrogate the status of various development projects and try to share ideas on how to unlock the challenges facing them. It is therefore very important that only the head of the implementing department attends them,” she noted.
The CDICC is a creation of President Uhuru Kenyatta’s Executive Order Number 1 of 2019 and aims at providing a platform for harmonized coordination and implementation of national government programmes and projects at the County level.
It reports to a regional committee which in turn reports to the national committee chaired by the CS for Interior. The meeting was also attended by Machakos County Government CEC in charge of Water, Dr. Naomi Mutie.
Presenting during the meeting, the officer in charge of Digital literacy program at the County, Ernest Kagongo disclosed that out the of the 837 public primary schools in the county, 773 had received all the necessary gadgets for the digital program.
He pointed out that the program was 92.4 per cent successful in the county, adding that most of the schools that did not receive the gadgets were new.
“Already, 28,830 pupils in the schools have received a Learners Digital Device (Laptops) while 1,546 teachers got a Teacher Digital Device each,” he explained, adding that all the affected schools had also benefited from a projector, content Access Point and a hard disk.
The officer however, noted that some schools were yet to be connected to power thus hampering their operations. He cited insecurity, teachers’ technophobia, lack of effective monitoring and evaluation as some of the challenges facing the program.
By Justus Keesi
