All payments to youths working under the Sh10 billion Kazi Mtaani initiative will be via M-Pesa, the government has said.
There will be no cash payment.
Housing and Urban Development PS Charles Hinga on Thursday said Safaricom had offered to waive the recovery of Fuliza loans and saved indebted youths from repaying their loans automatically using the earnings from Kazi Mtaani.
"Through this initiative, the participants have a grace period where they can withdraw their earnings once paid," the PS said in a statement.
He said M-Pesa ensures payments are processed successfully and in a timely manner. The system will also ensure transparency and accountability, he added.
The Kazi Mtaani programme is meant to cushion jobless Kenya youth against the economic effects of Covid-19.
Hinga said the first cycle of payments had a 92 per cent success rate. The remaining eight per cent had issues in their registration details. The PS urged youths in the initiative to provide correct payment details.
“For those whose payments failed, there was an ID mismatch between the number they provided for payment and the ID number registered for the phone. In some instances, workers’ phones were inactive or were not registered with M-pesa,” the PS said.
Earlier, unpaid Kazi Mtaani workers were asked to contact the county implementation committees through established channels for processing of their payments.
The national steering committee said legitimate claims would be processed after the CICs captured details such as names, identification and phone numbers and verified them against the returns from the paying agency.
“Workers are urged to only contact their CICs for processing claims and should not share their details with other persons except those who are officially part of the CIC,” the committee said.
The committee regretted that some workers’ details may have had errors, which resulted in their payments not going through.
The state gave the Kazi Mtaani youths a day to ensure their details were correct at the nearest Safaricom shop. However, Hinga said a number of them were yet to resolve their issues.
"Some youth have been diligent in working on correcting errors in their details by reporting the correct information to their county implementation teams. The others should be just as diligent in order to facilitate the bulk payments in time,” Hinga said.
Workers in the initiative are paid a daily rate of Sh455. Supervisors earn Sh505 per day.
"It is important to note that these are batch payments and the youth will be paid five days after the go-off shift. This will allow for the batch payments to be prepared and adequate due diligence conducted to ensure those who worked are indeed being paid," Hinga said.
Edited by Henry Makori
