Approval of buildings in Nakuru to go digital

Nakuru, 

Thursday, August 24, 2023 

KNA by Esther Mwangi

Nakuru County is setting up an automated online buildings approval platform for both commercial and residential investments, to help address cases of fraud allegedly perpetrated by crooked land brokers and agents. 

County Executive Committee Member (CECM) for Finance Mr Iribe Njogu said the platform will allow online submission of building proposals by architects and planners for evaluation and approval and automatically manage workflow to allow applications to be routed concurrently to the various technical evaluators. 

The CECM further said that the online system will also be used to provide unique identifiers of all approved development plans. 

By leveraging on technology, Mr Njogu voiced the County’s commitment to improve accessibility, transparency and accountability in its operations adding that the new digital development system will eliminate the need for human interaction in the approval process, making it more efficient and transparent. 

He said the online system is a milestone for the county and would go a long way in ensuring that building and construction industry services were done fast, cost-effectively and efficiently adding that the system will be automated from planning, building permits and approvals, occupancy permits, conducting inspections online using smartphones and iPads. 

In addition, the CECM said the system will help in the issuance of development permits, profiling of ongoing developments for inspection process, support for the planning enforcement process and data collection on inspections and archiving of all data. 

The new system, Njogu added is expected to boost the county's Own Source Revenue (OSR) by a billion shillings by the end of this financial year through the elimination of bottlenecks that characterized the old system. 

This kind of automation is said to have been successfully implemented in Kajiado, Nairobi, Mombasa, Kiambu and Kisumu counties, with Mr. Njogu expressing optimism that the online portal will help reduce fraud cases perpetrated by crooked land brokers and agents. 

While noting that the move was part of implementation of business regulation reforms hoped to make Nakuru more investor friendly, the CECM explained that developers will be able to track the progress of their approval applications thereby staying updated. 

“The automation is critical in enhancing Kenya’s competitiveness and will eliminate the tedious paper-based approval process,” said Mr Njogu. 

Nakuru has in recent years attracted huge interest by both residential and industrial warehouse developers due to the availability of vacant parcels of land in Naivasha, Salgaa, Bahati, Kabarak, Kiamunyi, Gilgil and Sobea areas. 

Mr. Njogu was happy that the rise in urbanization had continued to attract large investments in residential housing, educational institutions and industrial developments and said that the transformed land use across the county called for deployment of technology to support the key function of physical planning and construction permit issuance. 

Speaking at the County headquarters the CECM observed that online approvals had the capacity to cut the waiting time from at least 90 days to a maximum of 30 days. 

By removing the bureaucracy and reducing corruption associated with human interaction, Mr. Njogu said the digital system will accelerate the approvals process, benefiting both investors through ease of doing business. 

“Nakuru is one of the fastest urbanizing counties in Kenya. We need to control such a growth so that we don’t become a slum in the next 20 to 30 years,” added Mr Njogu.

Courtesy; KNA