Senait Abate, a young mother of 28, lives in Akaki Qality district but has been travelling to pay her utility bills at Kifiya's Lehulu branch in Qality for three days straight.

She went to the branch to pay her water and electric utility after leaving her toddler in the care of neighbours.

“I have to leave him behind, because I can’t bring him with me. Nor can I go back to tend to him, because I live too far," she said.

Senait is anxious to pay her bills before the authorities cut her services, especially the electric service.

And Senait is not alone. Many other residents of the city have experienced the difficulty of paying their utility bills at Lehulu centres.

Yehualashet Worku, a public servant who took time off from work, has been trying to pay his bills for two days. Toward the end of last month, he was standing in a long line at Lehulu's branch in La Gare.

Lehulu is a one-stop shop for various utility payments operated by Kifiya Financial Technologies, a public-private partnership (PPP) created to handle all services related to utility payments in Addis Abeba for the last seven years.

The Ministry of Innovation & Technology, which has lately been reorganized after the merger of the former Ministry of Science & Technology and the Ministry of Communication & Information Technology, is the public partner of Kifiya Financial Technology.

The PPP includes the electricity utility, Ethio telecom, Addis Abeba Water & Sewerage Authority and the Addis Abeba City Government Transport Bureau.

Every month customers including Senait and Yehualashet pay their bills at one of 32 Lehulu offices across the city. The system has created relief for the clients who have been going to each and every institution to settle their bills.

Lehulu earns 2.56 Br from each transaction and serves a combined base of around 850,000 customers using 370 employees. When the program was launched about 1.4 million customers were expected to use the service, according to the PPP.

Lately, clients have started to experience difficulty trying to pay their bills. Long queues began to be observed at the entrance of Lehulu centres, and clients were returning to the centres day after day just to process payments.

The problem has surfaced for multiple reasons, according to Fekadu Seifu, manager of Lehulu Qality centre.

The main difficulty was that the Addis Abeba Water & Sewerage Authority (AAWSA) has not been submitting the data in a timely fashion for two to three months.

Nigusse Desalegne, communications officer at AAWSA, admits that there was a 10-day delay in transferring the bills to Lehulu, because they were updating their system.

This resulted in customers lining up to pay their electric, telephone and water bills on different days as the situation worsened. This has created chaos since the number of people who arrive to pay their bills each day has been increasing.

As new condominiums come on line and new electric and water lines are being hooked up, the customer base has also increased significantly.

"The wait is particularly heavy after 5:00pm as people come here after work to pay their bills, since we are open until 7:00pm in the evening,” said Fekadu.

Recognising this, the Qality branch has asked for additional staff to accommodate the crowd, according to Fekadu.

Though Lehulu has increased staffing, it has reduced its number of branches by two, despite the fact the PPP calls to expand to 41 branches.

The closure of the two branches coupled with the late arrival of water and sewerage payment data from AAWSA have caused the recent inconveniences, according to Ahmed Mohammed, general manager of Lehulu.

Along with Lehulu, Kifiya operates Mela, a system developed for the Ethiopian diaspora to pay bills from abroad, such as insurance and school fees in support of relatives residing in Ethiopia. Another platform Kifiya operates is, YeneGuzo, an electronic ticketing system used for cross country transport.