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"speaker_name": "Hon. Speaker",
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"content": "pension schemes. From various projections, there are about 250,000 people who are poor and vulnerable and require to be brought into the Inua Jamii Programme. This will require an additional funding of Kshs6 billion annually as direct transfers to the additional 250,000 persons above the age of 70 years. The current budget has a deficit of Kshs3.9 billion. The Ministry will, therefore, require an additional Kshs9.9 billion to bring on board all the eligible persons above the age of 70 years. My Committee will be lobbying the House to allocate additional funding to the State Department for Social Protection to allow all our elderly persons above the age of 70 years to be in this programme. The second concern by Hon. Mwashako was on the mechanisms being employed to ensure social distancing rules are observed during the current payment cycle to protect the elderly from contracting COVID-19 and other contagious diseases. I wish to note that before the funds were released for payment on 20th April 2020, the Ministry made the following arrangements with the payment service providers (banks) on payment modalities and the hygiene protocols that included, among others, staggering payments as a way of minimising crowds, allowing elderly persons access pay points as a first priority before other beneficiaries, and providing for spacing through a sitting arrangement that ensures social distance is maintained. The list is long. The third concern was on the number of eligible beneficiaries who have been in the programme since 2017, but are currently omitted due to aforementioned technicalities. As at 2017, the Ministry had 833,129 Older Persons Cash Transfer beneficiaries in the programme. From November 2018, when a migration exercise from the card-based to account-based mode of payment was carried out, the Ministry successfully migrated 766,254 citizens who are in the current payroll. This means that 66,875 citizens have not been migrated into the new payment model. These citizens have various Integrated Population Registration Service (IPRS) related issues such as wrong identification number, name mismatch, duplication within and across the programme, sharing caregivers and wrong caregiver details, among others. Others in this category may have passed on while others may have failed to collect their tokens for account opening. Others may have opened accounts, but for some reasons, the respective PSP bank has not managed to submit the account to the programme."
}