President William Ruto’s government is set to take away the processing, printing and issuance of smart driving licences from the National Transport and Safety Authority (NTSA) and hand it over to a private entity.
This switch will allegedly be based on public-private partnership (PPP) terms and is being spearheaded by the State Department for Transport.
The department has based its decision on what it sees as the failure by the NTSA to meet annual targets.
“The uptake of smart driving licences has been slow. The project is under consideration for transitioning to PPP,” the Department of Transport stated in its budget proposal report to the National Treasury.
In this report, the department said that the transport authority had issued 2.1 million chip-based driving licences as at June 2025. This was lower than the target of 5 million licences, and means that overall, the NTSA has issued less than five million licences eight years since the program started.
In the year to June 2025, the NTSA printed some 342,492 smart driving licences. This was a shortfall of 57,508 licences on the target of 400,000. “The target was not achieved due to preference for a yearly electronic driving licences as opposed to the 3-year smart driving licences,” the transport authority stated.
In the year to June 2024, the authority had hit its target after printing 369,155 cards against the target of 350,000.
In 2017, the National Transport and Safety Authority entered into a deal with the National Bank of Kenya that was at the time worth Sh2.1 billion to supply, install and maintain five million second-generation licences. The bank then subcontracted the supply deal to another company and delivered four million blank cards.
Currently, the licences costs Sh3,050 and has a validity period of three years. It can be applied for at any NTSA station or at the Huduma Centre’s NTSA desks.
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