Civil servants have been urged to set aside at least three days a week to interact with citizens at the grassroots.
Makueni county commissioner Maalim Mohammed said although office work is equally important, field work is akin to bringing services closer to the people.
“When civil servants go to the field, they understand the kind of challenges citizens face when trying to access government services, thus improving on the methodology,” he said.
Maalim spoke on Saturday when monitoring the just-concluded national housing and population census in Kilungu, Mukaa and Nzaui subcounties.
He also said that the Department of Civil Registration has embarked on a digitisation process for birth and death records in Makueni county.
Maalim said the one-month digitisation drive will improve efficiency in the issuance of birth and death certificates.
He said the exercise will enable residents to apply for documents from any part of the country without having to travel to the county of residence or birth.
“The digitisation will improve the delivery of services to residents who travel long distances in search of the certificates,” Maalim said.
He said more than 200 data entry clerks have been contracted by the government to digitise the records.
County Civil Registrar Wycliffe Orata said the digitisation will help rule out cases of cheating and double registration that have been common with manual records.
"We will have a database for all the records in Makueni from 1992 when the office was operationalised and it will be easy to retrieve them unlike the manual ones," Orata said.
Makueni has only two civil registration offices based in Kibwezi and Wote towns.
Residents camp at the offices for days waiting for birth and death certificates.
Last year, parents spent cold nights at the offices after the Ministry of Education issued a directive that all schoolchildren should have a birth certificate for the National Education Information Management System(NEMIS).
