KENYA: ISO CERTIFICATE IS OFTEN A MANAGEMENT FAD

A day after the Nairobi City Council (NCC) was awarded its ISO certificate ( 27th April ,2012) like most kenyans I knew the NCC did not deserve it at all and in that unexplainable rage I'm wont to experience when I feel cheated and deceived by the corrrupt system I wrote a hasty letter to mailbox@ke.nationmedia.com and not my usual blog post. I wanted this deceit to be known Country wide. But since it was hastly done it never got to be published.

Kenya’s institutions of service delivery are all after getting the coveted ISO certification without putting in place any substantive change in how they give their services. On Thursday the Nairobi city council (NCC) was awarded the ISO certificate for ‘service delivery’.


Hasty institutional changes are made just to meet the expectations of the ISO audit body and often these changes are not about the provision of quality service to the citizens but just after the acquisition of the ISO certificate which gives this institutions something to boast about. It is often reduced to a piece of paper hanging on office walls with no reflection of any sustainable changes in how service is delivered.


Its time the institutions seeking to be ISO certified in Kenya make genuine and sustained changes in how they operate towards giving service and set new standards of operation. NCC is known for being very lax and unresponsive to its customers and recently an audit of NCC revealed ghost workers and a high percentage of unqualified personnel, this begs the question who gave the NCC the status of  International Standards of Operation? when the employees are not even qualified. 

Way to go NCC, your certification is another of the many management fads in Kenyan institutions of service delivery.

It goes without saying that many other ISO certified bodies in kenya have acquired them in underhand processes. And yesterday as the NCC ISO certificate was nullified and the body that certified it as unqualified and rejected, I felt like this is just the first step and many other service delivery bodies should be stripped of its ISO.