All civil servants in Zimbabwe have been given a week to avail themselves for the biometric registration exercise or risk being removed from the government payroll.
This move was made in a bid to uproot ghost workers and restore order to the country’s civil service.
The project is being run in partnership with the World Bank.
Dr. Vincent Hungwe, Zimbabwe’s chairperson of the Public Service Commission chairperson said “The PSC in conjunction with its technical partner, the World Bank, is pleased to advise all its stakeholders of the progress to date of the biometric authentication project.”
He added that majority of the targeted personnel have already been registered in the ”mop-up” exercise which ends on the 30th of September.
He urged any civil servants who have not yet registered to do so by the set date failure to which, he said, “they will be taken off the Salary Service Bureau payroll.”
The project will be run in three phases, the first of which ends on 30th September.
Phase 2 will run between October and the end of December. Dr Hungwe said Phase 2 would, “ensure that information within SSB as an entity responsible for effective and efficient salary management interfaces with the national biometric registration data.”
Related article: Zimbabwe’s Fintech Startup Payitup Nets $13m from UK’s Thawer Fund Management
The third and final phase of the project would involve validation of data in the national database by an independent service provider. Dr. Hungwe said, “After data validation and system integrity checks, the system will then be commissioned by early 2020.”
Local media reports that the Zimbabwe Public Service Commission (PSC) has been hard at work to reform the sector.
The PSC recently launched its year long Strategic Plan aimed at reforming the public service and improving productivity, accountability and remuneration as well as pension reforms among other changes.
