The Postal Corporation of Kenya has launched its clearing and forwarding services dubbed Posta Cargo with the aim of growing its footprint in the logistics market.
Speaking on Thursday during the launch, ICT Principal Secretary (PS) Jerome Ochieng said that this initiative, together with the ongoing National Addressing System (NAS), will greatly boost local and regional e-commerce, and enable Kenya to tap into the opportunity whose global value is estimated to rise to 2.36 Trillion dollars by the year 2022.
The PS explained that the National Addressing System provides for, among others, the naming, coding, numbering of streets and properties, in order to facilitate easy identification and location. The goal is to ensure that every person in the country has an address to be reached when necessary.
“We envisage to have digitized maps that will be used in the management of settlements and urban communities,” he said.
“The Ministry, in collaboration with the Communications Authority of Kenya and other stakeholders, is committed to deliver the NAS whose benefits are immense. Once in place, the NAS will ease the delivery of goods and services, and reduce costs across the board through improved efficiency on account of reliability,” highlighted Ochieng.
Ochieng said that as a Ministry they will come up with a Cabinet paper to urge the government that Posta cargo becomes the first option for clearing and forwarding of government goods and services since it is easy to have government to government procurement.
He added that the Universal Postal Union is building a comprehensive framework for e-commerce, which enables everyone to share in the emerging opportunities saying that Kenya has been selected by the Union, as one of the countries to roll out the regional e-commerce hubs in East Africa, leveraging on the extensive postal outlets.
“We note with appreciation that Postal Corporation of Kenya has never been granted any subsidy by the National Government since the split from the Kenya Posts and Telecommunication (KPTC) in 1st July 1999 and has until now been able to finance its operations despite the challenges experienced in the wider postal and courier industry globally,” said the PS.
Post Master General Dan Kagwe said that Posta cargo is the latest of their transformation with the others being the Mpost where ones phone become their box number and EMS to go which is the Uber version of Bodaboda where they have engaged more than 25, 000 Bodaboada operators across the country.
“As we embark on the journey of becoming the backbone of e-commerce in the region, this Posta Kenya National Logistics hub will be a key to seamless service to our customers this being the second one having opened the docks in Mombasa which is about 34, 000 square feet,” said Kagwe.
He explained that Posta Cargo is a courier service that offers one stop shop for clearing and forwarding services as they boast of presence in all the 47 counties and thus can do door to door deliveries.
“One of the things we need to do is to make the government stop operating in different silos, we have many government institutions importing various goods and if they do their clearing and forwarding with us then we are in good business,” said Kagwe.
He continued… “As a corporation we have the capacity to do all government clearing and forwarding needs and since we are not in the government allocation all we are asking is to serve and get paid for it and there will be more efficiency in Government.”
Kagwe highlighted that Posta handled all the logistics in the 2017 general elections and for the first time there were no issues of ballot boxes and other voting materials being left behind.