Registration of political parties now goes digital

Kenyans interested in registering and becoming members of a political party are now free to use the E-citizen platform and get all the services under the Office of the Registrar of Political Parties (ORRP).

Services on political party membership check status, political party membership registration and political party membership resignation are available on the platform that is famously used by other government agencies to get government services.

Addressing the media in Mombasa the Assistant Registrar of Political Parties Florence Birya said that there are currently 83 fully registered political parties and 21 that are provisionally registered.

Birya said the office of the registrar of political parties used to do registration manually thus the digitization serves as a relief.

“The critical activity in a political party is membership, for a long time registration has been happening in a very manual way, if we look at that process, the registrar has a responsibility to maintain a register of all political parties and members’ names,” said Birya.

She added that, In June this year the office of the registrar of political parties piloted the civil service to check the status of political party membership of Kenyans on E-citizen and it received a lot of feedback from Kenyans during the pilot exercise.

“We went a step further to include other extra services on E-citizen, we embedded services on the platform and that is why we want to explain to Kenyans that we have expanded,” she added.

The assistant registrar noted that the office developed the online service in a very close collaboration with the data commissioner taking into account the key requirements of personal data protection.

“We have a privacy policy statement whereby everybody giving information knows where the information is being used for, and in case of somebody feeling there is a breach or they are having a complaint we have indicated which office they can address to,” she said.

She added, the platform has a tick box whereby when a citizen registers to be a member of a political party, they have to be sure through ticking the box on if they want to give information and that they are giving information without coercion.

“This is advancement as an office and we believe that we are expanding the place for Kenyans as the country is a multi-party democracy state,”she said

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