Garden City, Kenya’s first integrated mixed-use real estate project offering shops, residences and offices, has today announced its involvelment with the Huduma Kenya Programme to open a new Huduma Centre at the Garden City Mall, the first Huduma Centre in a fully owned private facilitiy. The Centre is anticipated to be opened to the public in June 2018.
Chris Coulson, Managing Director, Garden City, commented: “As part of our world class mixed-use development, we’re delighted to introduce the new Huduma Centre as a key tenant in the Garden City Mall, offering the communities that we serve, both nationally and around the Thika Highway catchment area, easy access to a range of public services. The new Huduma Centre will also add to the convenience of living and working at Garden City for our regular shoppers, community of apartment and townhouse residents and our upcoming office occupants at Garden City’s Business Park offices.”
The Huduma Centre Garden City, dubbed ‘The Home of the Big Four’ is a great leap towards the actualisation of the Government’s Big 4 Agenda, aimed at transforming public service delivery by providing citizens, visitors to the country and investors access to various public services and information through integrated technology platforms from new, conveniently located ‘one stop shop’ Citizen Service Centres. The establishment of the centre at the mall is also a great show of effective working relationships between private sector and the Government.
Koome Gikunda, Director at Actis, commented: ‘This is an exciting development for Garden City and re-affirms Actis’ commitment to contributing to the realisation of the Kenya governments Big 4 Agenda. In addition to our investments in growing the Garden City precinct, Actis is ramping up its investments in both the housing and manufacturing sectors – the latter through an upcoming industrial and logistics park in Nairobi.’
The Huduma Centre at Garden City will offer both National and County Government services such as issuance of national identity cards, birth certificates, NHIF services, police abstracts, registration of business names and applications of business licences, NSSF services, investor related registrations, and many other services under one roof. The centre will also provide services centered around the Big 4 agenda areas of the Government.
Additionally, the centre will also have a great focus on the youth and will thus have an innovation hub that will allow the youth to work, innovate and collobare in a convenient and more affordable environment. The new Centre will not only bring these services closer to many residents of Nairobi city living in the catchment area, but also to those accessing the city centre via Thika Superhighway.
“Most people in Nairobi opt to visit our branch in the CBD partly due to its central location, but also because there is no alternative near to where they live or work, and as a result the CBD Centre is often oversubscribed. We already have five Huduma Centres in the city but the high population necessitates that we expand across all parts of Nairobi, and we hope that this new Huduma Centre Garden City will ease congestion at the CBD Centres,” said CEO, Huduma Kenya Secretariat, Dennis Mutuku.
The Huduma Kenya Programme is a Kenya Vision 2030 flagship project that was launched by President Uhuru Kenyatta, President of the Republic of Kenya on 7th November 2013, which coincided with the launch of the first Huduma Centre in Kenya at GPO Nairobi. The ministry of Public Service, Youth and Gender Affairs is currently coordinating implementation of the Programme.
Garden City’s integrated amenities are part of the ‘Live, Work and Play’ concept of this award winning mixed-use development offering a vast range of retail, dining, leisure and hospitality options as part of the add-on value for the anticipated 3,000-strong office community, as well as for the current residents of Garden City’s apartments and townhouses.
