e-Citizen is likely one of the most popular websites in the country because it provides government services online
While practically every Kenyan is familiar with the e-citizen platform, few know who created it.
The platform was established by Webmasters Limited, led by its founder and CEO, James Ayugi.
Ayugi is a technology expert whose life revolves around developing and administering technologies that improve efficiency in many industries.
In many interviews, Ayugi discussed the journey of building e-Citizen, stating that the idea originated in 2008 during the government of late former President Mwai Kibaki.
Former President Uhuru Kenyatta was finance minister at the time, and he created an e-registry with the hopes that Kenya will one day have an electronic payment system for government services.
Between 2008 and 2012, there was little development of e-Citizen.
However, things picked up when the new administration led by Uhuru Kenyatta took power in 2013.
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Uhuru’s teams promised to digitise government services during the campaigns, so Webmasters were invited to present a system to help solve the issue.
Following a successful presentation, the team created the e-Citizen platform, which went live in June 2014, with NTSA being the first agency to integrate its services into the platform.
Over time, the platform has expanded to include other government services such as person registration, immigration, NHIF, business registration and social services, among others.
Regarding platform ownership, Ayugi stated that his team signed a handover agreement with the government, handing the platform’s intellectual property rights to the government.
“In legal terms, the government owns 100 percent of the eCitizen ecosystem, the ownership was transferred through the agreement we had,” he said.
As a government services portal, the platform contains a large amount of private user data, which Ayugi claims is secure because a department can only access pertinent data.
He points out that even developers cannot access users’ sensitive information.
