City of Harare’s plan to decentralize its operations to districts will go a long way in improving service delivery and enhancing efficiency in the capital, the Harare City official said last week.
Addressing delegates who attended a Stakeholders workshop on Decentralization, the City Acting Town Clerk Josephine Ncube said the motivation behind the decentralization is to improve efficiency, good corporate governance among other issues.
“We want to decentralize so that we improve on efficiency, effectiveness and responsiveness. We also want to give room to our residents and districts to plan and prioritize for certain activities within their wards and their districts.
“We are also expecting good financial management, a robust billing system as most of our residents have cried foul over the billing system that we use.” she said
“The current system of centralization we currently have is causing delayed decision making and implementation of set targets. It has also slowed down service delivery and high consumer dissatisfaction. So we want to be moving away from that in order to make our more attractive and attracting investors and promoting the ease of doing business,” said the acting town clerk.
Ncube added that Harare has also moved to be a more improved and system driven organisation.
The HCC is currently using a 100 day rapid result approach as a performance management tool where tangible results are expected.
“During the first phase of the 100 day rapid response approach, some teams managed to meet their targets and have scaled up on the second phase. This program has enhanced the capacity for program planning and implementation,” Ncube added.
As part of the city’s world class city status by 2025, Ncube said they are introducing radical organisational transformation and the decentralization exercise is a step in the right direction.
“Current focus is on the interactive phase of the 2025 road map. We have developed a customer focused and collaborative goal 2017-2020 being Harare to achieve 75%customer/stakeholder satisfaction by 2020.
“Customer satisfaction can only be achieved through efficient service delivery and decentralization is a strategy towards attaining that goal,” she added.
