Client Context

Kenya’s electrification success is real and unevenly distributed. Connection rates in the central and western counties bear little relation to those in the arid and semi-arid north and northeast, where population density makes grid extension economically indefensible and distance makes it operationally difficult. The Kenya Off-Grid Solar Access Project, financed by the World Bank through the Ministry of Energy, was built for exactly those places: fourteen underserved counties where mini-grids, standalone solar systems, and solar water pumping would deliver what the grid could not.

Programmes of this design carry an institutional assumption that rarely receives scrutiny. The Project Appraisal Document defines functions each implementing agency will perform, and the implementation schedule assumes those agencies can perform them. Between the appraisal document and the ground sit a project coordination unit, a project implementation unit, and fourteen county energy departments, several of which were established recently and were exercising devolved energy mandates for the first time.

The Challenge

Assessing capacity is straightforward in principle and unforgiving in practice, because the question is not what staff can do in general but what they can do relative to what this specific programme requires of them.

The assignment had to establish desired capacity, drawn from the functions the Project Appraisal Document assigns to each implementing agency, then measure existing capacity against it, across three distinct institutional types with different mandates and starting points. National coordination and implementation units required programme management, procurement, technical, and safeguards capability. County energy departments required something different again: the ability to plan, coordinate, and oversee energy delivery under devolved mandates many were still defining.

The assessment also had to look past training as a universal answer. Where a gap exists, the cause may be missing skills, but it may equally be insufficient staffing, poorly divided portfolios, or an institutional arrangement that prevents capable people from applying what they know. An audit that recommends training for every gap it finds is diagnostically lazy and expensively wrong.

Finally, the output had to be actionable across four years and multiple institutions, prioritised rather than exhaustive, because a training plan listing everything that could be improved provides no basis for deciding what to fund first.

Our Approach

ACAL assembled a team spanning human resource and organisational development, sociology, economics, financial management, and statistics, reflecting that institutional capacity is not solely a training question. The assessment began from the Project Appraisal Document, deriving the specific technical and functional capabilities each implementing agency required to perform its assigned functions, then measured actual capacity against that standard across the coordination unit, the implementation unit, and the fourteen counties. Findings were validated through workshop before the training plan was built, ensuring the institutions being assessed recognised the gaps as real. Priority training needs were then identified and structured into a four-year plan, accompanied by recommendations on the enabling environment and institutional arrangements that would determine whether training, once delivered, could actually be used.