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A leading innovator in Kenya’s HR and payroll space has developed a new app that could potentially help keep ghost workers at bay.
Over the past few decades, ghost workers have proven a thorn in both private and public institutions, costing firms and government agencies billions, as they lack proper management systems to track the enrollment and payment of casual workers.
FaidiHR in a statement said it has launched a Fintech product dubbed CasualPay aimed at transforming the way businesses manage and pay casual labourers in the country.
“Kenya, like many other African countries, has a significant informal sector with a substantial number of casual workers including but not limited to plumbers, office cleaners, electricians, construction workers, farmers, and domestic workers among others,” the statement reads in part.
Statistics from the Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) Labour Force Survey Report for 2020 indicate that the informal sector in Kenya employed approximately 15.9 million people.
This accounts for about 83.6 per cent of the total employment in the country.
Despite the increased adoption of digital technology in the country, however, the majority of business owners are still managing casual workers’ attendance using paperwork that is filled out on a daily basis to track how many days the worker is present at work.
Not only is this a tedious process but it is significantly prone to manipulation and errors.
Reconciling this data at the end of the week is also time-consuming since it must be transferred to spreadsheets before the final dues are calculated.
This introduces loopholes for fraud as this data can be manipulated to allow ghost workers into the system as well as provide room for exaggerated and erroneous payments.
The CasualPay App, however, has the ability for businesses to manage casuals in a cloud database, allowing attendance to be booked in the system on a real-time basis and the reconciliation of working days which automatically computes the total amount owed to the casuals.
Additionally, business owners are able to initiate payments which once approved ensure that all the casual labourers receive their money via M-Pesa automatically with the click of a button.
The Fintech product has been developed as a result of feedback from the firm’s payroll and HR platform customers who apart from managing their full-time employees felt the need to automate casual attendance management and payments.
Prior to the official launch, the platform had already attracted more than 1,000 casual workers being managed on the digital system while more are expected to be on-boarded.
The platform is free to access with the only fees charged being transaction fees capped at Sh50 per transaction. BY THE STAR