Client Context

Kenya’s national highways are economic infrastructure before they are transport infrastructure. The corridors KENHA manages carry agricultural output to markets and ports, move imported goods inland from Mombasa, and form the Kenyan sections of regional trade routes reaching Uganda, Rwanda, South Sudan, and beyond. The condition and capacity of that network shapes the cost of doing business across the economy, which is why road investment consistently commands one of the largest allocations in the national budget.

The Authority’s mandate is correspondingly broad. It carries responsibility for the development, rehabilitation, management, and maintenance of national trunk roads, alongside the procurement and supervision of the contractors who execute that work, and increasingly the structuring of financing arrangements that extend beyond direct exchequer funding. It answers to the Ministry responsible for transport, to the National Treasury, to development partners financing major corridors, and to the road users and freight operators who experience the network’s performance daily.

An institution operating at this scale, with capital programmes running over multiple years and financing drawn from several sources, cannot be steered by annual budgeting alone. It requires a strategy that sets direction across the planning horizon its projects actually occupy.

The Challenge

Strategic planning for a national infrastructure authority poses a problem that generic corporate strategy methods handle badly. The institution’s core work runs on timelines longer than the plan itself. A major highway moves from feasibility through design, procurement, construction, and into maintenance over a period that can exceed a decade, which means a five-year strategy must position the Authority within programmes it did not start and will not finish.

Three further tensions had to be resolved in the plan rather than deferred. The first is the perennial balance between new construction and maintenance of the existing network, where political visibility favours the former and asset economics favour the latter. The second is financing: exchequer allocations, development partner programmes, road maintenance levy proceeds, and public private partnership structures each carry different conditions, timelines, and institutional demands, and a strategy that treats them as one funding pool misrepresents how the Authority actually works. The third is delivery capability, since an authority that plans more than it can procure, supervise, and administer produces stalled projects and contractual disputes rather than roads.

The plan also had to be measurable. A strategy for a public institution that cannot be assessed against defined actions provides direction without accountability, and the Authority’s oversight relationships, ministerial, Treasury, and development partner, all require the latter.

Our Approach

ACAL assembled a team matched to the distinct disciplines the mandate required and structured the engagement to move from institutional diagnosis to measurable commitment. Strategic planning, transport planning, policy analysis, and contract management expertise were deployed together, reflecting that a highways authority’s strategy is simultaneously an infrastructure question, a policy question, and a procurement question. The work established the Authority’s operating environment and mandate alignment, then developed the strategy architecture from vision, mission, and core values through strategic themes to objectives, and finally into SMART actions specific and measurable enough to support performance assessment. The fourteen-month duration allowed the consultative depth a national authority with multiple oversight relationships requires, engaging the Director of Policy and Planning as commissioning counterpart and the Director General’s office as the plan’s ultimate owner.