Client Context

Kenya is urbanising faster than its institutions are adapting. By 2050, more than half the country's population will live in urban areas. The infrastructure, governance systems, and fiscal frameworks that will determine whether that urbanisation creates prosperity or compounds poverty are being built right now, at the county and municipal level, largely out of sight of national policy.

The Kenya Urban Support Programme was the World Bank's response to that structural reality. Launched in 2016, KUSP was designed to strengthen the institutional and infrastructure capacity of Kenya's urban areas, directing development grants to municipalities that could demonstrate governance performance against defined standards. The mechanism was straightforward: municipalities that met performance thresholds received funding. Those that did not received capacity building support to help them qualify. The entire system depended on one thing working correctly: the annual assessment that determined who qualified and who did not.

That assessment, the Annual Capacity and Performance Assessment, had to be credible. Not credible in the sense of producing acceptable-looking reports. Credible in the sense that the findings would hold up to World Bank scrutiny, withstand challenge from municipal governments disputing their scores, and produce data rigorous enough to directly shape the design of successor programmes. ACAL was appointed as Independent Verification Agent for that assessment, a mandate that has been renewed across the full life of KUSP, spanning 79 municipalities in 45 counties over a decade.

In parallel, ACAL was retained as Independent Verification Agency under the Kenya Devolution Support Programme, the World Bank's complementary intervention at the county government level, conducting the Annual Capacity and Performance Assessment across all 47 county governments.

Together, these two mandates gave ACAL a view of Kenya's subnational governance landscape that no other institution in the country holds.

The Challenge

Assessing the performance of 79 municipalities and 47 county governments simultaneously, against detailed and legally grounded criteria, is not a technical exercise with a predictable outcome. It is a politically sensitive process in which findings determine the flow of significant public resources, and in which every score has a government counterpart who will scrutinise the methodology, challenge unfavourable findings, and escalate disputes to the highest available authority.

The assessment framework covered three dimensions. Minimum access conditions established the baseline requirements a municipality or county had to meet simply to qualify for assessment. Minimum performance conditions set the threshold for basic operational competence. Performance measures captured the quality and trajectory of governance across areas including public financial management, service delivery, planning, and accountability to citizens.

Each dimension required a different kind of evidence. Financial management assessments required the review of audited accounts, scrutiny of audit opinions from the Office of the Auditor General, and verification of submission timelines against statutory requirements. Service delivery assessments required field verification, not just document review. Governance assessments required interviews with officials, community representatives, and oversight bodies across geographies where access was not always straightforward.

Getting this right, year after year, at scale, while maintaining the methodological consistency that allows performance to be tracked over time rather than just assessed at a single point, was the central challenge of the mandate.

Our Approach

ACAL designed and maintained the full assessment architecture for both the KUSP and KDSP mandates, deploying multi-disciplinary field teams across Kenya's 79 municipalities and 47 counties in successive annual cycles. The approach was built around four non-negotiable commitments: methodological consistency that allowed performance to be tracked across years, evidentiary rigour that would survive formal challenge, field depth that reached Kenya's most remote assessment sites, and analytical synthesis that connected assessment findings to policy decisions rather than stopping at compliance documentation.