Africa-Press – Zambia. Ndola City Council (NCC) has disclosed that it is considering various possibilities of digitizing payment methods in order to strengthen its capacity to efficiently deliver services.
Ndola City Council Town Clerk Cosmas Chalusa said the local authority was embracing technology in order to strengthen its capacity to expedite service delivery.
This came to light when the local authority held discussions with some entities on how to successfully digitize revenue collection in order to improve collections, serve on time and subsequently improve service delivery.
Mr. Chalusa said when Kazang Zambia made a presentation to the council management on digitizing payments for selected services. Mr. Chalusa said digitizing various aspects of the council payment modes would help officers work more efficiently, serve the residents on time and contain pilferage of resources.
“There is a need for Council workers to improve efficiency because the increase in the Constituency Development Funds (CDF) means that decentralisation is now in full effect.
The increase in CDF means that councils will oversee more projects, a situation which calls for the councils to find ways of working more efficiently in order to ensure that all projects are completed on time and completed properly,” he said.
He added that councils needed to prove that they have the capacity to oversee the increased CDF because some sections of society had expressed doubt in the capacity of officers in local authorities to manage the increased Fund.
Mr. Chalusa said digitizing some of the components of the council will enable officers have time to do more work. And the Ndola City Council Director of Finance Mildred Nyambe urged council employees to embrace technology.
Ms. Nyambe said technology made it easier to track resources adding that the proposal by Kazang was a welcome move as it focussed on Council revenue collections in bus stations, markets, and car parks, areas that used cash transactions.
Meanwhile, Kazang Zambia National Sales Manager Bradley Chingobe said the merchants’ payments system the company is proposing will enable bus drivers, market traders and motorists pay using mobile money through the Kazang machine.
Mr. Chingobe said the system will also help the council monitor revenue collectors’ performance. This is according to a statement issued to ZANIS in Ndola today by NCC Public Relations Manager Rebecca Mushota.
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